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Libby Brooks: The truth is some smokers are more equal than others  

Last week, friends and supporters of the smokers' lobby group Forest raised a doleful cigarette to the first anniversary of the smoking ban in England. On the terrace of a smart private members' club in London's Belgravia, the redoubtable David Hockney - a regular contributor to the letters page of this newspaper on the subject - bemoaned for the umpteenth time the Labour government's curtailment of his liberties, fag in hand.

Across the room, Forest's director Simon Clark - a non-smoker, please note - told me of social lives destroyed and publicans in peril. Clark makes a rather dubious distinction between habit and addiction. "There are some people who are addicted," he told me, "but for many it's a pleasurable habit that they like to do in social situations." And yet the fact is that 70% of smokers say they want to quit.

As a smoker myself, I've always been faintly embarrassed by the pronouncements of this group . . .

What troubles me most about Forest, which is now campaigning against proposed restrictions on the selling of tobacco, is that it completely fails to acknowledge that smoking is a class issue. When cigarettes initially entered the marketplace, it was the upper classes who first took them up. Smoking spoke of wealth and sophistication. But, as the product filtered down through society, it lost its class glamour. By the time that details of the serious health implications of smoking were made public, the rich were already predisposed to giving up. . . .

Last week, Tayside health service drew some criticism when it announced a scheme to encourage smokers in Dundee, where half the population lives below the poverty line, to quit smoking in exchange for grocery vouchers. . . . One of its leading advocates, Cass Sunstein - a former colleague of Obama's at the University of Chicago Law School - has coined the oxymoronic term "liberal paternalism" to encapsulate his theory: while freedom and transparency remain essential, it is possible and legitimate for governments to guide people towards better lifestyle choices when, whether through apathy or befuddlement, they exhibit tendencies to plump for bad ones.

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