I also received an email yesterday advertising a sports centre and telling me that:

New legislation requires everyone to stop smoking in enclosed places.
As an alternative to smoking why not try exercise.

Yes, instead of stepping outside for five minutes to have a ciggie, why not travel across the city to the sports centre for some circuit training. In other news:

New legislation requires everyone to stop glorifying terrorism.
As an alternative to glorifying terrorism why not try knitting.

The Salisbury Convention, initiated by Lord Salisbury, is the arrangement that dictates that the House of Lords will not vote down or wreck with amendments measures that appeared in the Government’s manifesto. It dates back to a time when the big Tory majority in the House of Lords – thanks to the hereditary peers – meant they could, theoretically, block the Government’s programme.

The convention has become increasingly disregarded, for good reason. While Labour insist the Lords should stick to it, they have themselves failed to follow through on their promises to make the second chamber more democratic. The Tories and LibDems in the upper house therefore argue that the chamber as it exists now is how the Labour party chose to leave it, with the in-built Tory majority of the past long gone. They also argue that, thanks to the continued use of first-past-the-post in general elections, the party make-up of the House of Lords actually better reflects the views of the public at large than the undeserved majority achieved by Labour in the House of Commons.

In today’s theguardian, Baroness Scotland is quote as insisting the Lords should leave the ID cards bill alone:

“We went to the electorate and said, we want identity cards and it will be a compulsory scheme in the long term.”

Lord Phillips, for the LibDems, points out the exact wording of the Labour manifesto:

We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports.

His position is that this should mean that people renewing their passports could opt to join the voluntary scheme, not be forced into it, as the Government wishes. Semantics aside, the wording of Labour’s manifesto is redundant, and it is their own doing, because on page 66, it said:

We will legislate to ensure that all enclosed public places and workplaces other than licensed premises will be smoke-free. The legislation will ensure that all restaurants will be smoke-free; all pubs and bars preparing and serving food will be smoke-free; and other pubs and bars will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. In membership clubs the members will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. However, whatever the general status, to protect employees, smoking in the bar area will be prohibited everywhere.

Having made this promise, in the manifesto on which all Labour MPs were elected, the Government then allowed their MPs a free vote and the exemptions for bars and membership clubs were removed.

Why is it OK for Labour MPs to ignore one section of the manifesto, while peers (who were not elected on it) are expected to fall in line with another?

Campaigners argue bringing the law on cigarettes into line with that on alcohol would reduce under-age smokers.

Of course it wouldn’t. It might reduce the number of under-16s smoking, but by definition under-age would mean under-18s after the change and I imagine there will be more under-18s smoking then than there are under-16s smoking now, if only because there are two more years’ worth of teenagers to factor in.

A poll conducted last year for the BBC found that four out of five people backed lifting the legal age to 18.

Of the 1,010 adults surveyed, 55% said the minimum age should go up to 21.

“Hello, I’m doing a poll. Are you over the age of X?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think privilege Y should only be available to those over the age of X?”
“Yes, yes I do.”
“Gosh, what a surprising result. I must write that up immediately.”

"There are things I will not tolerate: students loitering on campus after school, horrible murders with hearts being removed… and also smoking."

As the Government’s confused partial smoking ban trundles closer, it seems that the number of exempt pubs could rise by a third as they stop serving food to escape the new restrictions. The proposal to ban smoking in pubs where meals are served is based on the well-known scientific fact that second-hand smoke is more harmful if you are eating.

Meanwhile, GNER trains are now entirely non-smoking following the abolition of designated smoking coaches. According to GNER, this is

in direct response to passenger wishes and follows detailed research which showed that more than 90% of GNER passengers do not smoke and that most wanted smoking on trains to be abolished.

You can be sure they carried out this predictable research after spotting the problem of East Coast Mainline trains passing from England, where smoking carriages would be permitted, to Scotland where, from next year, they would be illegal.

The unintended consequence? Judging by my experience last night, smokers are now saved the effort of traipsing to coach B for a fag: they just light up wherever they’re sitting. And as there are no ashtrays in coach D, the smoker in question blew his tobacco detritus onto the seat opposite. Charming.