The new UK smoking laws.
The new laws about to be given royal assent has some great ideas but one that will only cause confusion and frustration as for as o can see.
Anyone born in or after a certain year will be banned from taking up smoking. I can see this being pulled in the future. It will cause chaos for a few years.
Anyone born in or after a certain year will be banned from taking up smoking. I can see this being pulled in the future. It will cause chaos for a few years.
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I'm not sorry it's banned on public transport or inside cafes and restaurants but I do wonder about a complete ban, as I don't think prohibition seems to work (qv America and alcohol in the prohibition era)
We don't have ID cards here in the UK.
Starmer did a U-turn on that one as on other unpopular policies.
Reminds me of the Licensing Act 2003 which made it an offence to sell alcohol to an intoxicated person. The law was as I recall vigorously enforced for a while, then more or less ignored ( except when it was a convenient justification for the licensee to eject obnoxious customers). Despite a theoretical £1000 fine and the potential loss of an license, there have been few prosecutions, given the number of pubs/ drunkards in England and Wales
Though the government is pushing a mandatory digital ID in the works.
There's a really important difference though. The US prohibition on the sale of alcohol came down all at once on everyone (theoretically -- it was more enforced upon poor people, immigrants, and Black people), whereas the UK law phases it in starting with people who are now minors. You're not making the sale of tobacco illegal to people who currently buy it legally. Adults who smoke don't have to find illegal sources of cigarettes. Minors who already smoke are getting tobacco illegally anyway.
In the US an industry that employed a lot of people was destroyed virtually overnight. So all those people who had earned a living producing and selling alcohol had to either do something else or break the law. Given that plenty of people still wanted to drink alcohol, there was plenty of motivation to break the law. The UK law isn't going to create a huge illegal supply from law-breakers to satisfy a huge demand that's suddenly been made illicit. I think if you're going to make something illegal that people have done for hundreds of years, phasing it in is the way to go.
And don't give me crap about Big Brother - governments already have all this information. I'm simply talking about how to make it easier/simpler to use the information already available.
The countries that have ID cards don't seem to have suffered, do they?
Hazy information is a very different thing from focused data.
You think governments haven't already joined the dots?
Working in local government and occasionally dealing with central government I can absolutely attest to that. Balkanisation and incompatibility are rife.
In typical British fashion, it is left to the discretion of the retailer.
I was never asked for any ID when I first started visiting pubs, either before or after my 18th birthday.
(Whereas I was drinking in pubs aged 16 despite being a tiny, young looking girl.)
Thank you that was interesting
Doublethink, Admin