If anti smoking plain package zealots succeed, the only winner will be the black market

The anti smoking industry has such zeal that it has lost all sense of how humans behave. This puritanical group, for whom their cause is a substitute for religious belief, are concerned to make tobacco tax ever more prohibitive and legal restrictions ever more draconian. But people will adjust their behaviour. The more unreasonable the laws are made, the greater the number of those who are normally law abiding who will 'defy the law' - not as a conscious political cat but merely as a means of continuing to go about exercising familiar choices in a way which is affordable.

Remorselessly the anti smoking brigade, using emotional lobbying on craven politicians, are pushing us towards becoming a country where smoking tobacco is a criminal offence. Such a ban would not stop people smoking - but it would go a long way to stopping respect for the rule of law.