I'm not a smoker and never have been. I don't like being in places where I can't get away from others' smoke. I don't like it when my clothes get saturated with cigarette smells, or when I find myself breathing the smoky exhalations of the person walking ahead of me in the street. I am glad airplanes are smokeless.

Still, I think it's wrong to ban smoking in private establishments such as pubs. We ought to let the market take care of whether smoking happens in such settings; business owners should be able to decide whether their bars are smoking or non, as the spirit moves them. Anything else is intrusive and infantilizing. Freedom--and perhaps art--depend on it.

Here's a fun meditation on the problem from the Telegraph:

What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis?

The answer is, of course, that if they were to come back to life in Gordon Brown's Britain and wanted to go out to their club, or a restaurant or café, they would not be allowed to indulge in a habit which sustained them during the most creative phases of their lives.

The moment they popped their favoured cigar, cigarette or pipe between their lips and lit up, they would have been fined on the spot.

There were, we must concede, books before there was tobacco in Britain

But is it mere chance that the lifetime of Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?-1618), who introduced tobacco-smoking to England, was also the time when the great story of English literature really began? Milton - a smoker -and Ben Jonson - a smoker - ensured that the Elizabethan glory-age was not to be a flash in the pan.

I have been racking my brains to find a single non-smoker among the great English poets or novelists of the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries. Possibly, Keats had to lay off the pipe tobacco a bit after he developed tuberculosis.

Otherwise, from Swift and Pope to Cowper and Wordsworth, from Byron to Charles Lamb, they were all smokers.

Tennyson, who only stopped smoking in order to eat and sleep, describes in one of his letters sitting in a pub with a friend and doing very little except "staring smokey babies" at one another.

Nowadays, this harmless experience would cost the publican L1,200, and Tennyson himself L600, while appallingly self-righteous non-smokers at neighbouring tables, rather than being pleased that they had enjoyed a glimpse of the greatest Victorian poet, would be complaining about the fumes which they chose to believe were causing them some kind of damage.