Heads They Win, Tails You Lose

What a difference a few years makes, eh?

2012:

The group claims advances in extractor fan technology would allow pubs and other indoor public places to allow smoking without a causing a health risk to non-smokers. 

But Belinda Cunnison, the convener of Freedom to Choose Scotland, said: "I believe the smoking ban should at least be modified.
   
"The ban was brought in because of the accepted view that passive smoking is impossible to eradicate using ventilation equipment. We don't accept that this is the case." 

The pro-smoking petition appears to have little chance of success.

And it failed.

Scroll on to 2015 though ...

Gage, 43, whose parents died of cancer after smoking, said he was vulnerable to tobacco smoke at Shotts jail and the Scottish government should move him. 

A judge has now ruled there is nothing illegal about his prison conditions. 

The Scottish government contested the action and the court was told that Gage was housed in a relatively modern prison with ventilation systems.

So when the Scottish government want to ban law-abiding citizens from enjoying themselves in establishments with the permission of the owner exercising his/her property rights, ventilation is useless and the myth of secondhand smoke is lethal.

Whereas when defending itself against exactly the same claims of harm to a prisoner, ventilation is all of a sudden miraculous and can mitigate the effects of a non-existent problem. It's almost as if they don't really consider secondhand smoke that dangerous themselves, isn't it? As if it's just an imaginary hobgoblin being employed as a tool for coercion or something.

Do you reckon if a pub chain applied the same argument, the Scottish government would waive any punishment for contravening the smoking ban? Nope, not on your nelly!

Politicians just take the piss, don't they? Every. Day.