If we let the Nanny State hound parents who smoke in cars, I dread to think who it’ll pick on next

MANY people will instinctively applaud the Labour peers who successfully introduced an amendment yesterday in the Lords that would lead to a law banning smoking in cars carrying children.

A free vote in the Commons — when MPs will be able to vote according to their consciences — now seems likely after this amendment to the Children And Family Bill. Labour has in any case said it will include such a ban in its manifesto for the next election.

My sympathies were fleetingly on the side of a ban. The consensus that passive smoking is harmful led in 2007 to the prohibition of smoking in most enclosed public places in England. If a bloke in a smoke-filled pub might be at risk of developing cancer or heart disease, so presumably would children in a smoke-filled car.

Indeed, one might argue that such children deserve even more protection since they may be in a car involuntarily, whereas a person walking into a smoky pub or café, when such places existed, was making a choice. Moreover, it is plausibly suggested that, with their delicate, developing lungs, children are more vulnerable to tobacco smoke than adults.

The thought of a six-month- old child laced into a baby- seat in the back of a car breathing in clouds of smoke is horrifying even to those of us who suspect that the dangers of passive smoking may have been exaggerated by the medical lobby.

So without really considering it very much, I mentally sided with the Labour peers when I heard about their plan on Radio 4’ s Today programme yesterday morning. Perhaps I should mention here that I am a non-smoker.

Then I began to wonder. The most obvious objection to a law prohibiting smoking in cars carrying children is that it would be very difficult to enforce. Say the age cut-off was 16. Even if a policeman could spot an adult smoking in a car, how could he or she know whether an accompanying child was under 16?

Either the police would decide that it was an unenforceable law, in which case there is no point in introducing it, or they would officiously stop lots of drivers whose passengers were over the age of 16 although they looked younger.

BUT there are deeper philosophical reasons for resisting such legislation. The trouble is that the ‘Nanny State’ never lets up. With every victory it intrudes further into our lives, presuming to make more and more decisions for us, and to circumscribe our autonomy.

I’d say most parents were better at parenting than the State. They usually love their children, and want to do the best for them. Any child is exposed to hundreds of risks in the course of growing up, which the caring parent attempts to minimise.

No sensible parent would give a young baby a scalding cup of milk or leave it alone in front of an electric bar fire. No loving mother or father would allow a young child to cross a road unsupervised or ride a bicycle on a dual carriageway. Even the busybody Nanny State does not yet presume to interfere in such matters, though it lectures parents on road safety and other matters. It loves poking its nose into our domestic affairs, but still recognises that parents should, for the most part, be left to look after the well- being of their children.

Why, then, should it lay down the law over smoking in cars? Ninety-nine people out of a hundred are surely aware that tobacco smoke may be dangerous to the other occupants of a car — how much so no one really knows — particularly if the windows are closed.

The State has a duty to educate and inform parents about dangers of which they may not fully aware, and in respect of smoking in cars it has fulfilled that duty pretty comprehensively. It should not threaten parents with the criminal law. Trust to their good sense, on which all children depend.

What is certain is that, if a ban is introduced, it will not stop there. Before long, politicians will be questioning the right of adults to smoke in cars in the presence of other adults.

Then legislators will wonder whether a person driving a car without passengers should be permitted to smoke. After all, the State already tells us that we must wear seat-belts for our own good, and might extend that principle to outlaw smoking.

And then it will be argued with equal force that if children are at risk in cars as a result of the smoking of adults, so they are in houses. On the Today programme yesterday, Luciana Berger, shadow public health minister, asserted that tobacco smoke is 23 times more toxic in a car than in a home.

What idiocy! How can she possibly know? We should always distrust politicians and others who spout figures that can only be speculative with mathematical certainty. My completely unscientific guess is that smoking in houses could be just as dangerous as it is in cars.

Most young children spend far more time at home in the company of parents than they do in cars. They may find themselves in comparatively small rooms in which windows are more likely to be shut than is the case when they are being driven around.

ONCE smoking in cars in the presence of children is forbidden, it will inevitably be outlawed in houses, too. The Nanny State will come back again and again demanding ever greater restrictions on our freedoms — always presenting arguments that in themselves seem reasonable and logical — until the very act of smoking at home alone will finally be pronounced illegal.

Smoking is plainly lethal, at least to many of those who indulge in it. No one, apart perhaps from the tobacco companies and their lobbyists, can baulk at the prospect of fewer people smoking, and therefore fewer people dying sometimes ghastly deaths.

But this desirable state of affairs should be achieved by persuasion and perhaps a little punitive taxation on cigarettes — not by hounding a still substantial minority, and in the process eroding personal freedoms.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the amendment to ban smoking in cars carrying children was introduced by doubtless well-meaning — but also bossy and coercive — Labour peers, and has now been adopted as official policy by the Labour Party. If there is a free vote, I hope that the good sense of MPs will prevail.

A State which determines that smoking in front of children is illegal will see no difficulty in criminalising light smacking, and finding other means of instructing their children. And the more the State usurps the autonomy of parents, and arrogates to itself the right to direct them, the more helpless we will become, and the more dependent on those who say they know better than us.

The question of whether smoking in cars carrying children should be banned may seem a small one, but it is actually part of a much bigger argument in which, one by one, important liberties are being ceded. Let’s draw the line here, and trust parents and the good sense of ordinary people.