SMOKE GETS IN THEIR EYES

Politicians Are Trying To Stamp Out Cigarettes But Not The Social
Despair That Lies Behind The Fatal Attraction

And What's Happening? Smoking Is Regaining Its Cool Image

THE EDINBURGH Festival is always a great place for picking up straws
in the political wind; and I first became aware of one of this year's
recurring ideas at the opening performance of David Greig's big new
play, The Speculator. The action is set on the streets of Paris in
1720, and there's a remarkable tavern scene in which, among other
things, a man from Mississippi tries to introduce the clientele to the
joys of tobacco. Some say "lovely", and wheeze with pleasure. One
announces, to a huge laugh, that he "could get addicted to that!".
Some blow blue smoke-rings, and sink into a contemplative haze,
backed by Hamlet-cigar-style music. One sees visions of a new world
unrolling in front of her, before passing out cold; and the audience
laughs, in some kind of recognition.

The next night, I followed the blue smoke trail to the King's Theatre,
where the heroine of Tom Murphy's play The Wake leads a trio of rebels
against the miserable, uptight materialism of her small-town bourgeois
family in an occupation of a closed-down hotel; once there, they smoke
like furnaces and drink like fish for three solid days, with the warm
emotional support of the entire audience. Over at the Assemby Rooms,
meanwhile, the St Petersburg post-modern clown show Fantasia contains
a whole sequence, satirical but also lyrical, celebrating the Russian
national passion for smoking; the performers puff away ecstatically as
the light fades, and the glowing tips of their cigarettes gradually
begin to perform a little swirling ballet, like fireflies against the
dark.

And it seems to me that our political leaders and parliamentarians
here in Scotland should perhaps give some attention to images such as
these - and the powerful, sympathetic audience response they attract -
before they wade any further into the fraught business of health
education and anti-smoking legislation. Already, this week, we've seen
the launch of yet another health campaign, in which 12 Scots
celebrities urge the people to give up the cigarettes and deep-fried
pizzas; and the media has picked up signals that backbench MSPs may be
about to push for legislation to ban smoking in public places, on the
model already enacted in France and many US states. But if I read the
cultural runes aright, both initiatives may only succeed in making the
fatal weed more popular than ever.

For in the first place, this new wave of positive smoking imagery
reflects the fact that for many people smoking is a real sensual
pleasure; and that where a pleasure is suppressed, it gradually begins
to acquire the potency and glamour of a forbidden joy. In portraying
on stage the pure ecstasy of smoking, shows such as Fantasia and The
Speculator are breaking what has become a fairly strong social taboo;
and the audience responds with the same kind of complicit laughter as
a bunch of Victorians glimpsing a showgirl's garters.

And the same is true out in the streets and public places of Britain,
where smokers - clustering on the pavements outside their offices, or
sent to puff in exile in some gloomy basement - are rapidly acquiring
the wrecked, rebellious, flirtatious camaraderie and attractiveness of
an oppressed minority, a kind of French resistance of devil-may-care
hedonists in a world of uptight health freaks.

After all, as the iconic "choose life" monologue in Irvine Welsh's
Trainspotting pointed out on behalf of a whole generation, anyone with
any gumption is likely to feel a strong rebellious impulse against a
society whose best offer, for most of us, is to become like one of
those squeaky-clean Stepford families in a Tony Blair election
manifesto; and so it's hardly surprising that many under-thirties
tend to reach for the gin and coffin-nails, in the hope of dying
before they ever have to think about the cost of a private pension
plan.

And what that means, in policy terms, is that the more government
tries to ban and discourage indulgences such as smoking, the more
attractive they are likely to become. Already, in health-obsessed
America, a bit of ostentatious nicotine abuse by starlets and models
is becoming a style item. Already, rates of tobacco addiction in young
women are rising, in direct defiance of endless well-meaning public
health campaigns; and already, smokers are less shame-faced and more
mutinous than they were a decade ago.

It's not disputed, of course, that tobacco kills. It is a fiercely
addictive, murderous drug, and its death toll in Britain alone is
equal to a jumbo-jet crash every day. But people will not be persuaded
off it by lectures from, or restrictions imposed by, the very
politicians who help create - or who supinely accept - the stresses
that make people long for the brief respite of a fag and a drink. To
give up cigarettes, people have to want to "choose life" in a very
deep sense, which is why many women do it when they first become
pregnant; and that suggests that politicians who want to help us
resist the weed should forget the moral lectures, and concentrate on
building the kind of society that offers more of us the sense of a
life worth living.

And if that is true for millions of ordinary salary-slaves, it is many
times more true for the real casualties of Scotland's public health
crisis, the long-term unemployed, the chronically poor, and the kids
whose only hope of ever acquiring money or status seems to lie in
crime. There are plenty of them portrayed in Fringe shows too; and
what is crystal-clear, both dramatically and psychologically, is the
connection between their self-destructive behaviour - drink, drugs,
cigarettes, unsafe sex - and their complete lack of hope. To put it
simply, there is no point in telling people that they ought to value
and care for themselves, when they live in a market economy that has
already measured their value, and declared them worthless.

And at this level, serious questions arise about the morality of
modern western politicians who busy themselves with condemning the
symptoms of social despair, while resolutely refusing to treat the
disease. This is a generation of politicians, after all, who will not
seriously reform patterns of land ownership that give rise to a deep
sense of grievance; but who will make the pathetic class-war gesture
of banning a marginal phenomenon like foxhunting. And by the same
token, they will not confront the deep structural reasons for the
sense of humiliation and hopelessness that drives so many
working-class Scots to wreck their health; but will show what mighty
men and women they are by making it increasingly difficult to have a
cigarette on a night out.

On the surface, in other words, these wrangles over things to come in
the Scottish parliament - about foxhunting, or smoking in public - may
have the appearance of political debates. But in reality, they are not
about politics, in the sense of legislation that could better the
lives of thousands; but about the death of politics in a blizzard of
media-friendly trivia. And then the politicians wonder why the people
drink and smoke so much.

Perhaps the next time they ask, we should just tell them that we're in
mourning for the kind of politics they've consigned to history; and
that we're having a damned good wake.