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Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, I wish that the Government and other people would make up their mind. We have heard this afternoon that tobacco is an addictive and dangerous drug, not only to children but to everybody else. Of course, many people accept that; I accept it myself. But the Home Secretary does not. When Professor Nutt suggested that tobacco was more dangerous than cannabis, the Home Secretary sacked him. So it is quite obvious that the Home Secretary takes a different point of view from that taken by the right honourable Mr McCartney and the Secretary of State for Health. So where are we on tobacco? Is it so dangerous that, as Professor Nutt says, it should be made a class B or class A drug? Or is it not as dangerous as those drugs and therefore should it remain a completely unregulated substance? It is about time that we had clarity on this, although obviously we are not going to get clarity on it this afternoon. I was regularly in Grand Committee when we discussed this matter, where one decision was made virtually by unanimity, with no change in the situation made at Report. Now, however, the Government have decided to accept an amendment to their own Bill. Let us also not forget that this is a House of Lords Bill; it is not a House of Commons Bill. The House of Lords is quite entitled to insist that the Bill should be as it was when it left here. Indeed, the Government should be insisting that the Bill should be as it was then. If we were discussing something that involved losing 650 jobs, the closure of 200 factories, making some people bankrupt and making it difficult for 70,000 public houses at a time of rising unemployment, we would all be outraged. Yet we are proposing to do this with impunity. Of course we are being told, "That’s rubbish". In every debate that we have had about tobacco—and by God I have taken part in some of those debates during my period in this House and, indeed, in the other House—we have been told, "It won’t really affect businesses in the way you say it will". For example, when we were debating the ban on smoking in public places, we warned, because we had information from the industry, that many public houses throughout the country would close. Again, we were told that we were talking nonsense. Yet thousands upon thousands of pubs have closed up and down the country. If the prevention of smoking in public places did not have the whole effect, it certainly had a partial effect on an industry that was going through a difficult time. We have heard about an alternative this afternoon—the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, first raised it—which could possibly solve the problem for everyone. Indeed, he quite rightly said that perhaps the House of Commons was not aware of this new system that has been produced at some cost to the vending machine industry. Why would we not do this? I go back to the ban on smoking in public places. We spent a lot of time on it in Grand Committee, with a lot of expertise from various people. We could have prevented a complete ban by providing instead for the separation of smokers from non-smokers. The Government would not listen. They would not even consult the people who could provide the air-conditioning equipment that would have allowed the separation of smokers from non-smokers and helped the pubs industry through a difficult time. I go back to where I started. For heaven’s sake let the Government make up their mind about where they are going on smoking. I fear that the reason why they do not want to have a complete ban on smoking—that is really what they are advocating; that is what they are after, to make it completely illegal for anybody to smoke—is that they are afraid of the electoral consequences and do not want to lose the £10 billion of revenue that they get from people still daring to smoke. Please let us have some honesty about this matter and not have the Government say on the one hand that smoking is bad for you but on the other hand that it is not as bad for you as cocaine or cannabis.