TOM BROWN: Real issues lost in haze

DON'T think the huffing and puffing are over. First Minister Jack McConnell's announcement of a public smoking ban in Scotland is a smokescreen.

The political fug surrounding this so-called "brave" announcement is as murky as walking into a boozer thick with the reek of baccy.

For more than a quarter of a century I have campaigned against smoking. First as a medical correspondent, then I made it part of my personal manifesto when I began my column in another paper.

But I quit the habit of smoker-bashing about 10 years ago, because the battle was won. Everybody now knows it's disgusting, smelly and anti-social - and, above all, it kills.

It's been obvious for ages that there would be a ban on smoking in restaurants, pubs and clubs. So why my grudging response to Jack's "stub 'em out" order?

Because it's a slow-burn, wimpish way of dealing with an urgent problem. When passive smoking causes 1,000 deaths a year in Scotland and sends 17,000 children in the UK under the age of five to hospital because of the effects, that's urgent.

So why set 2006 as the target date for the ban? Why will it take until Christmas to even bring the necessary Bill before the Scottish Parliament?

If McConnell & Co. are serious about this, they could ram the legislation through in weeks and have the ban operating from New Year's Day. Then it would be a Happy New Year for everybody except smokers, who are too daft to matter, and pub owners who will moan and whinge while still ringing up profits.

The Scottish Executive smokescreen also obscures the crucial question of enforcement. The police won't be raiding pubs and clubs, collaring puffers and making them cough up on-the-spot fines.

Will the war veterans who live across from the Parliament REALLY be fined up to pounds 1,000 if they persist in lighting up their pipes in the Jenny Ha' pub - one of the few pleasures left to them?

It is being left to licensees to enforce a law, with which they don't agree. Are they really going to dial 999 and snitch on their customers? If they don't, they could lose their licences and their livelihoods. In the privacy of clubs, especially those with separate smoking bars, are staff or fellow members going to become informers?

And what constitutes an "enclosed public place"? For starters, why not ban smoking anywhere on NHS property? Those crowds of smoking patients at hospital doors, many of them wheezing asthmatics and even amputees in wheelchairs, whose limbs have been removed because of smoking-related compli-cations, should not be allowed. If they insist on smoking while receiving expensive treatment, they should be sent home.

What will McConnell's smoking police, the National Smoke-Free Areas implement-ation group, do about the undesirable effect reported from Ireland? Off-sales have risen, which means more parents are drinking and smoking at home with the kids around them.

The smokescreen is thickest when it cloaks the Executive's real motives. The anti-smoking move makes it look as if we have a bold, energetic Scottish government that is achieving something.

The truth is that they are making damned little progress on the things that are more important to ordinary Scots, smokers and non- smokers alike - the violent crime and yobbism that blights our streets and neighbourhoods, the drugs menace, hospital cuts with more to come, the under-performance of the Scottish economy, the rise in the number of homeless children in Scotland.

When they become smoke-free, we'll smell the truth about a lot of pubs - the stale beer, stench from the toilets, BO, belches and breaking wind. I wonder what the odour will be when the smoke lifts from Jack's ban?

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