Most UK smokers will probably remember 1 July 2007. I certainly do. That was the day we smokers were expelled from UK pubs, and – as ASH director Deborah Arnott had accurately predicted – were “exiled to the outdoors”. I’ve been there ever since. Just today, since it was sunny, I visited a local pub, and as ever sat outside with a beer and a cigarette.
1 July 2007 was a day when the world turned upside down. And stayed upside down. Smokers had been welcome in pubs since time immemorial. And now, by an Act of Parliament, they were no longer. The world has never seemed quite right since.
I’m beginning to wonder if 24 June 2016 was an equally memorable day, for more or less the exact same reason. Because that was the day Britons woke up to find that a majority of them had just voted to…