UK Health Secretary's Comments Anger Anti-Smoking Groups

By Patrick Wintour and Colin Blackstock

The health secretary, John Reid, angered health campaigners and anti-smoking groups when he said yesterday that smoking is one of the few pleasures left for the poor on sink estates and in working men's clubs.

Mr Reid said that the middle classes were obsessed with giving instruction to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds and that smoking was not one of the worst problems facing poorer people.

"I just do not think the worst problem on our sink estates by any means is smoking, but it is an obsession of the learned middle class," he said. "What enjoyment does a 21-year-old single mother of three living in a council sink estate get? The only enjoyment sometimes they have is to have a cigarette."

His statement provoked an angry reaction from anti-smoking campaigners. A spokesman for the anti-smoking group Ash said: "It's incredibly patronising to talk about smoking in this way. The argument is that we should have smoke-free work environments. John Reid has got this hang-up about the middle class imposing itself on the lower class, when it's the least empowered, people like bar workers, who are having smoking imposed on them." According to Ash, men in socio-economic groups AB are twice as likely to reach the age of 70 as those in groups DE, with smoking being the biggest contributing factor. Women in social class 5 are almost twice as likely to die from lung cancer as women from social class 1.

Mr Reid's deliberately challenging remarks at a Labour Big Conversation event in south London suggests he will be cautioning against an outright ban on smoking in public places being included in the Labour manifesto.

He said he was an advocate of informed choice for adults, rather than bans, describing himself as favouring empowerment, rather than instruction. Mr Reid fears advocates of a ban are behaving as if members of the public are incapable of coming to their own sensible decisions.

The British Medical Association said that it was surprised by Mr Reid's remarks, but it would continue to lobby for a ban. "Quite apart from the individual damage to smokers, there's passive smoking to consider. It isn't just damage they do themselves, it's the damage they do to others."