France banning outdoor smoking is a stunning example of how politicians fail to understand real people

Only this morning, Bernie Sanders, the man I say was robbed of the US presidency (by H. Clinton), was on the radio – BBC Radio 4 – talking about what matters in politics. And the secret? It is those arcane elements: being paid enough to feed a family, job security, having a job, decent healthcare.

That, in the 83-year old’s view is what cuts in for ordinary voters. Clever, huh? His interviewer was Justin Webb, who pressed him gently on why the Democrats lost to Donald Trump.

Was it, by any chance, their wokeness, the emphasis by their corporate donors on trans issues and their reluctance to engage with immigration? Sanders responded that the voters in Vermont didn’t always agree with his pro-abortion stance, but because they knew he was pro the working classes, they still voted for him.

This may seem a roundabout way to address the startling news that France is going to ban smoking at beaches, bus stops and in parks, starting from the beginning of July.

Those of us who like a Gaulois sitting outside a bar (even if like me, you’re a rubbish smoker) can however exhale again, because it’s still allowed there. But the point of the thing is not just that it’s utterly futile – do I need to point out that even if you smoke like Humphry Bogart in Casablanca, you can’t poison the aether – it’s one of those useless but insanely annoying policies which manages to infuriate a sizeable minority of the electorate.

Put it another way, if Emmanuel Macron (and I refuse to make a joke about the wife-smack here) had been sitting down with his advisers to work out how best to drive even more voters to the National Rally, Marine LePen’s outfit, they couldn’t have done better than a policy to ban smoking outdoors.

Or to put it like Bernie Sanders, if you wilfully ignore the issues that matter to most people – jobs, healthcare, immigration, crime – and instead devote your time and energy to banning things that the working class quite like (I’m guessing that most smokers are less well off than the bureaucrat class), well, you’re not going to endear yourself to the mass of voters, are you?

Put it another way, France is at present undergoing a very disturbing spate of violent crime. If you were a disgruntled householder in, say Marseilles, with its exciting drug-dealing communities, which would you rather have the police spend their time on: monitoring parks for errant fag-users or attempting to arrest actual criminals?

For an equivalent issue here, see the dusty response the police got when they decided to focus on controversial online comments from conservative columnists (Allison Pearson) rather than on trying to catch burglars…it honestly doesn’t go down well.

The measure is in theory designed to protect children from the malign effects of passive smoking. But ask yourself, how can you actually engage in passive smoking outdoors? You need a confined space for that – a car, say. Even the most committed smoker could hardly get a child to inhale his smoke unless he actually puffs in the infant’s face.

That’s the thing about outdoors; there’s a lot of air out there, in which smoke visibly disperses. On a beach, a brisk sea breeze makes it practically impossible to engage in passive smoking.

Granted, a majority of people asked say they’re in favour of a ban – but that’s if they’re asked; it’s not going to be at the top of anyone’s wishlist. It is the kind of measure that is not actually designed really to achieve its stated objective; it’s more about bossing people of whom the lanyard classes disapprove.

If you can’t deal with the big stuff, why, there are people doing things out there that are patently bad for them….go stop them! It’s control freakery of the irrational kind we saw a lot of during Covid.

Remember the time when we were only allowed to venture outdoors for an hour every day and if we did more, the police came and stopped us? This was in defiance of the plain fact that we were safer outdoors than indoors and it was difficult to catch Covid outdoors, unless you were snogging a carrier. A rational policy would have been to get as many of our activities – schools, shops, religious services – as possible outdoors, whatever the weather. But oh no. The chance to control the population was simply too much for the Government to pass over.

Banning smoking outdoors in France is, I would say, rather un-French. When the smoking bans came in here, lots of people gravitated there to get away from the nanny state.

The freedom to engage in an activity that is pleasurable but bad for you is not always absolute – cannabis smoking is a case where controls are necessary – but smoking, which has been with us since the seventeenth century, is one for rational control and civility, not a stupid ban that makes no practical sense.

There will however be winners from all this…the parties which present the government of Emmanuel Macron as woefully out of touch and with all the wrong priorities.

Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist