Outdoor smoking ban would aim to make ‘fewer places where you can actually smoke’ says education minister
Good morning, and welcome to today’s blog, bringing you the latest news across the UK’s political scene.
The government’s outdoor smoking ban will aim to make “fewer places where you actually can smoke”, education minister Jacqui Smith has said.
Responding to calls from industry that an outdoor smoking ban would be another “nail in the coffin” for hospitality, Smith told Sky News:
The biggest nail in the coffin of most people in this country is smoking – 80,000 people die every year from smoking related diseases.”
She added:
We will think about all sorts of different ways, as the last time I was in government, we introduced the smoking ban, the first smoking ban, there was a lot of concern at that point about how it was actually going to work.
I think most people now, including in the hospitality industry, would say our pubs, our restaurants, are much better places because they’re no longer filled with smoke.”
Smith further stated:
What we’re trying to do is to make, both through lifting the age at which you can start smoking, by providing ways in which you can get out of smoking, and by making fewer places where you actually can smoke, we want to make it much more likely that people who are direct active smokers will actually want to give up smoking, and by doing that, safeguard their own health and safeguard the NHS and the pressures that smoking brings on to it.”
More on that in a moment. In other developments:
James Cleverly has been accused of increasing the asylum backlog in the spring of this year by “dithering” over key decisions. Ministers under the then home secretary refused to give caseworkers permission to tackle outstanding cases covered by the Illegal Migration Act, departmental sources and the UK’s biggest civil service union have told the Guardian.
The Conservative MP Esther McVey has been urged to “get a grip” after she posted a poem about the Holocaust to criticise government plans to introduce outdoor smoking bans. McVey, the MP for Tatton and a former cabinet minister, posted on X the words of Martin Niemöller’s 1946 poem First They Came, about inaction from within Germany against the Nazis.
Keir Starmer has been warned against caving in to pressure to water down a ban on exploitative zero-hours contracts, after fresh evidence showing the financial hit for millions in insecure work. Bosses have told the prime minister he risks causing “real damage” for the economy if the government’s proposals for the biggest overhaul in workers’ rights for a generation are pushed through too quickly.
Labour risks a serious rift in the UK’s special relationship with the US if it goes ahead with a ban on arms sales to Israel, Donald Trump’s last national security adviser has warned. Robert O’Brien, still one of the key security voices in the Trump circle, said the UK was endangering its future role in the F-35 project as well as facing the risk of US congressional counter-embargos.
Keir Starmer has had a portrait of Margaret Thatcher removed from No 10 Downing Street, according to his biographer. The decision to take down the painting, first reported by the Herald, has been criticised by some in the Conservative party.
