Re: smoking and the pub
Further to the discussion of private planes ...
It has been the tactic of the pro-smokers in this thread to reduce the arguments in favour of a ban and to attempt to deconstruct them, the resulting deconstruction sounding authoritative but actually bearing little resemblance to the matter in hand.
The parallel between aircraft and pubs is clear and obvious. The law bans smoking on the 0730 BA flight from Glasgow to Heathrow and it bans smoking on the Airtours/Monarch/Air2000 charter flight to Marbella/Faro/Gran Caranria/wherever. All of these examples are *public* flights, whether scheduled or chartered, because the *public* are invited to take seats on them.
The matter of private planes chartered by private groups is utterly irrelevant to this discussion, as the Government is not proposing banning smoking in private homes.
Xaccers also mentioned earlier that the smoking ban on planes was introduced for fire safety rather than respiratory health reasons. Again, this is totally irrelevant and misses (I hope not wilfully) the point I was actually making. Here it is again anyway:
We do not hear continuous complaints that our civil liberties and freedom of choice are being infringed by the ban on smoking on aircraft. Why not?
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