Best Gordon Brown Quote Yet

This is the best Gordon Brown quote I have yet heard:

"I take full responsibility for what happened. That's why the person who was responsible went immediately."

He was talking about the Labour email smear scandal. And in case you think I've paraphrased or quoted out of context, here it is on YouTube. Look out for the guy in the background that suddenly realises he's in the shot and wishes he wasn't. That quote made it into Private Eye this week, and Have I Got News For You.

I'm going to talk about the UK smoking ban. It's illegal now in Britain to smoke inside in any structure where people are employed. So that means pubs, clubs, shops, trains, buses, even your car if it's provided by your employer. I don't smoke and consequently I find that almost everywhere is now rather nicer to be, because there is no smoke. My libertarian core however recognises that the ban is in fact an assault on civil liberties. So, although I think the world became a nicer place when smoking was restricted, I'm not sure it was in fact the right thing to do. That's just so you know my position on this one.

The argument in favour of banning smoking in public places goes something like this:

If you smoke near someone else, that person will involuntarily inhale your smoke and their health may suffer as a result of passive smoking. Therefore you should not be allowed to smoke in any place where other people are unable to avoid your smoke because they are employed there.

It's a bit woolly really because there is no firm evidence that passive smoking is actually dangerous, but the argument is logical in my view. I think we have to accept that, given what we know about tobacco,inhaling second-hand smoke really can't be good for a person. I have always broadly accepted the validity of this argument. But last night I was listening to the radio and I heard a new argument that goes something like this:

OK, we believe that second hand smoke is probably not good for you, might even kill you, so we ban it to prevent innocent people being affected by this smoke. There is a much stronger, causal link however between people drinking alcohol, driving cars, and then killing someone. Should we ban alcohol too?

This argument came at me out of nowhere. I'd never even considered this one before. It took me a few minutes to work out the flaw in it. We haven't banned smoking, we've only banned it in public places where other people can be affected. In the same way, we don't need to ban alcohol, we only need to ban it behind the wheel of the car where it can affect other people, and that is exactly what has happened. So, my view hasn't really changed, but I thought the new argument was interesting.