Mark Andrews: Smoking ban makes dystopian fiction a reality, and why it means we will eventually end up paying reparations for slavery

The above is a quote from the 1994 novel Drop the Dead Donkey 2000, where the writers of the popular television comedy looked forward to a dystopian future at the dawn of the Millennium, where commonsense and moderation had been overwhelmed by a zeal for voguish obsessions.

Now it emerges the Government is planning to make the spoof Tobacco Act a reality, by extending the existing smoking ban to cover outside public spaces as well.

It took a bit longer than the book suggested, but we got there in the end.

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My burning question is which page of the 2024 Labour manifesto did this appear on? I think I may have one missing, because I can't find the stuff about scrapping the winter fuel allowance or paying the train drivers £73,000 a year either.

Still, not to worry. We can all rest secure in the knowledge that the Prime Minister unambiguously promised that taxes won't go up for working people.

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Drop the Dead Donkey may have foresaw the ban on smoking in public – and indeed Richard Branson owning a high-street bank – but it never envisaged a time when cigarettes could only be sold in plain packaging, and had to be surreptitiously stashed in a secret cabinet. Or that laws that would eventually deem people in their 40s and 50s too young to buy them.

Not only that, but some radio phone-in callers were this week urging the Prime Minister to go further, even banning smoking in the home. We live in strange times.

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The obsession with banning people from smoking confirms my theory that if blinkered 'activists' repeat a ludicrous idea often enough and for long enough, it eventually becomes mainstream simply through familiarity.

Sometime about 1990, one of the Midland councils, I think it was Solihull, came up with something called 'traffic calming', which involved putting chicanes and other obstacles into the path of cars to slow them down. At the time it sounded like an April Fool, and was rightly ridiculed on the Ed Doolan show. But 30-odd years later, this junk is everywhere.

The same principle applies to the more extreme elements of the 'climate justice' lobby and the 'gender' zealots.

And it's why I'm certain that, sooner or later, British taxpayers will end up paying 'reparations' for the slave trade, despite no living person having any meaningful connection to it.

The problem is that ordinary folk aren't so obsessive or dogged about any of this stuff to resist. The 'activists' always grind us down in the end.

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Not that I hold any brief for smoking. I've never smoked a cigarette in my life, and struggle to understand why anybody would spend thousands of pounds a year to inhale foul-smelling smoke knowing there is a 50 per cent chance it will kill them.

But then again, I've no idea why anybody would buy a James Blunt album or watch Love Island, but have no desire to stop them from doing so.

Yes, passive smoking is anti-social. But not half as bad as the lungful of cannabis smoke I inhaled in the middle of Bridgnorth on Monday. Maybe the Government's attention would be better turned to enforcing the existing laws about smoking, rather than bringing in more?

I was going to say don't hold your breath. But, of course, that's increasingly what we are having to do.