There will be an army of smoking inspectors, with powers to raid the premises where smoking is suspected and test for illicit traces of tobacco. Once shopped and copped, the evil smoker can be fined £50 for a first offence; whoever is in charge of the premises will have to cough up £200.

I have not had a cigarette in 15 years, and can find other people’s smoke as irritating as the next man in the pub. But the ridiculously detailed plans for a public smoking ban in England, published this week in a Department of Health consultation document, should be enough to make the eyes water of anybody who wants to live in a sane society.

The stated aim of DoH policy is “to make almost all enclosed public spaces and workplaces smokefree”. The document emphasises that unhyphenated word, “smokefree” — an invented word that seems to imply a pettifogging ban is the path to freedom. I don’t normally bang on about Orwellian nightmares, but that sounds like something out of 1984. The DoH document leaves no ashtray unturned. It proposes a legal definition, not only of “smoke” and “smoking”, but also of “enclosed”, “roof” and “wall”, and specifies that those countless non-smoking signs must all be “at least 280mm by 200mm”.

The Government plans to separate most pubs and bars that sell food, where smoking will be banned, from the minority that do not, where it will be permitted. The document calls these latter pariahs “drinking pubs”, a term that might once have been thought tautological, but which clearly differentiates them from the food-serving café society that the Government now wants to protect against smoking, bingeing riff-raff. Drinking/smoking pubs are to be given a list of ready-made bar snacks that they are permitted to sell, and inspectors will crack down on unlicensed snacks. There is even a proposal to ban smoking within one metre of the bar in smoking pubs. The document admits that “there is no evidence that this would provide any health benefits”, but so what, let’s outlaw it anyway.

I don’t see hard evidence that any ban on public smoking would provide public health benefits. But let us leave aside the health arguments about passive smoking. The DoH plan is a manifesto for a government hooked on attempting to micromanage behaviour, with a vision of a straitjacketed society where almost the only places smokers are free not to conform with the ban are prisons or psychiatric units. You don’t have to be mad to smoke here, but it helps.

• WHEN Bob Geldof appeared on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross two weeks ago, he shocked the studio audience and millions of BBC One viewers with a terrible tale about how the bodies of dead African men, women and children were “washing up daily” on the small Italian island of Lampedusa, whither they had fled in makeshift boats. The mayor, said Geldof, had “no room left on his island, no room left in any of the fields” to bury the “thousands” of corpses, so the mainland authorities were “sending cargo ships, to fill up with bodies”.

  Brendan O’Neill, my colleague on spiked (www.spiked-online.com) has now looked into this horror story and found that it is, in the Lampedusa mayor’s words, “absolute nonsense”. In an article published today he reveals that, while many desperate Africans do seek refuge on Lampedusa and some have died trying, there are not bodies washing up daily, no overflowing cemeteries or burial fields and no cargo ships.
  
  Why did it take a fortnight for anybody else to check Sir Bob’s facts? In these cynical times, we often seem willing to suspend our disbelief for the benefit of well-meaning celebrities. Being righteous, however, is not the same as being right. To update Karl Marx’s favourite motto: “Question everything — even Bob Geldof and Jamie Oliver.”
  
  mick.hume@spiked-online.com

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