The crazy world of England’s smoking ban
First there’s the fact that the flimsy evidence that passive smoking causes any significant harm is taken seriously. According to figures from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) – Britain’s fundamentalist anti-smoking lobby group – the incidence of lung cancer for non-smokers is about 10 cases per 100,000 people. Regular passive smoking (that is, living with a smoking partner, not just encountering one in bars or restaurants) increases that by about 25 per cent – 12.5 cases per 100,000. So, even if these figures are correct, passive smoking causes 2.5 cases of lung cancer per 100,000 of the population; to put it another way, these are odds of 40,000-to-one of potentially getting lung cancer from passive smoking. On the basis of these remote risks, a war against smokers has been built.
This equality for women is an injustice for men
Equality is a principle that is constantly being tested to destruction. Harriet Harman’s proposed Equality Bill is a startling case in point. She is right to insist on equal pay for equal work; that is a principle that nearly every woman in the country must believe in passionately, and by now most men as well. It is clearly wrong to pay one person less than another for the same work, simply because of her sex (or indeed his colour or age). It is and ought to be illegal.
However, this principle soon grows into much more ambitious and more nebulous ideas about equality at work, including the dubious concept of equal representation – equality not just by person but by group. These ideas, as Harman’s bill clearly shows, lead not only towards an explosion of bureaucracy and cost, but also towards injustice and inequality – towards the destruction of the very principle.
However, this principle soon grows into much more ambitious and more nebulous ideas about equality at work, including the dubious concept of equal representation – equality not just by person but by group. These ideas, as Harman’s bill clearly shows, lead not only towards an explosion of bureaucracy and cost, but also towards injustice and inequality – towards the destruction of the very principle.
