Ukip in pub smoking pledge

A POLITICAL party wants to bring back smoking inside Wales’ pubs.

Smoking inside bars and restaurants was banned in Wales in April 2007 due to the overwhelming evidence of the devastating impact smoking has on the health of both the smoker and those around them.

The new policy from Ukip Wales would allow pubs to create “smoking rooms” and “where it is not desirable to construct smoking rooms, Ukip Wales would also give pub landlords the right to declare their pub ‘all smoking’”.

The party has declared the new policy “common sense”.

Toby Green, tobacco policy lead at the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH), says the ban was “one of the biggest public health interventions we’ve seen in the last 15 years”.

Before the ban there was a large body of research linking passive smoking to health problems.

Studies showed breathing in secondhand smoke increased an adult non-smoker’s risk of lung cancer and heart disease by a quarter, and of stroke by 30%.

In UK bars before the ban, air pollution from cigarette smoke was much higher than the “unhealthy” threshold for outdoor air quality – as set by the US Environmental Protection Agency – a University of Bath study found.

Levels in Welsh and Scottish bars were often twice as high as in English bars. After the ban, air pollution in UK bars reduced by as much as 93%.

Ukip leader Neil Hamilton MS said: “Most of all, Ukip believes in freedom of choice. Freedom not to drink in smoke-filled rooms but also freedom to smoke if others are not inconvenienced.

“That’s the free society we believe Wales should strive to be.

“Individuals should decide for themselves what risks they run in life – whether smoking, free-fall parachute jumping, or being bored to death by a Mark Drakeford speech.”