Britons, who have been smoking tobacco since Elizabethan explorers brought sacks of it home from the Americas over 400 years ago, face a ban on lighting up in thousands of pubs and workplaces across the country. Under a government proposal announced on Tuesday, smoking will be barred in all workplaces, public buildings, restaurants and all pubs in which food is served.
The move comes a week after Scotland announced a similar ban and six months after Ireland became the first country in the world to outlaw smoking in all its pubs and restaurants. The city of Liverpool has announced its own unilateral ban.
However, the government stopped short of a total ban on smoking in all public places. Smokers will still be allowed to indulge their habit in private clubs and in pubs which do not serve hot food.
"This is a sensible solution, I believe, which balances the protection of the majority with the personal freedom of the minority," Health Secretary John Reid, a reformed heavy smoker, told parliament.
But the initiative was attacked from all sides.
Anti-smoking groups said it did not go far enough, describing it as "a huge missed opportunity" to stub out a habit which claims 106,000 British lives a year.
"It seems bizarre that the government has accepted the wisdom of a ban but is then happy to deny the benefits of it to people who work in private clubs and pubs where food is not served," said Alex Markham, chief executive of Cancer Research.
Diehard smokers said it was another example of Britain's interfering "nanny state" telling people how to live.
Britain traces its smoking habit to the 16th century, when explorers like Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake brought tobacco leaves from the Americas to a curious Elizabethan public.
Raleigh is widely credited with introducing Queen Elizabeth I to tobacco in the 1580s although it had been in circulation in the taverns of Shakespeare's London since the 1560s.
Tobacco was touted as a miracle cure for everything from toothache to venereal disease, flatulence and even cancer.
But even then, it was a controversial habit.
Elizabeth's successor James I wrote an essay on it, decrying the "black, stinking fume" of burnt tobacco and describing smoking as "a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain (and) dangerous to the lungs".
Around 25 percent of Britons smoke. Their habit brings some 11 billion pounds ($20.4 billion) into government coffers but also costs the state billions in health care.
Moves towards a largely smoke-free world seem inexorable.
The Irish ban has been hailed as a success by the government in Dublin, which released a survey in August showing 82 percent of people supported it and 70 percent felt it had improved their enjoyment of pubs.
Norway and Malta have followed Ireland's lead, Sweden will do so next year and smoking is already banned in bars in cities and regions across Australia and the United States.
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