A BAN on smoking in public places outdoors is not a bad idea. Tobacco still kills 80,000 people a year. It is the biggest cause of preventable deaths in the country. It costs the NHS a fortune. A responsible government should be looking at ways of tackling it.

The “freedom-lovers” who are going to oppose the ban really just want to be able to selfishly continue to inflict their secondhand smoke on the quiet majority who do not enjoy the gauntlets they often have to run where the air is left full of the noxious fumes of tobacco and the sicky-sweet smell of vapes.

There’s a pub garden in Wensleydale, with beautiful views, where one smoker or vaper can, because of the prevailing wind, wipe out the pleasure of 20 or more tables of people who’d prefer to enjoy the taste of their food and drink in the countryside without accompaniment.

But, having said this, we do worry about pubs. The 2007 indoor smoking ban did harm them, although now, looking back through clean air rather than the blue fog of the old days, it is inconceivable that a pub could survive now if it had such a polluted atmosphere.

We also worry about how practical a ban might be – are our police, who don’t have the numbers to tackle shoplifters, going to be chasing naughty smokers down the street?

And more than smoking, where only those with a deathwish make the informed choice to carry on burning the weed, we worry about vaping.

Vaping is safer and preferable to smoking – but only if you are a smoker. We seem to have given the younger generation the impression that it is fine to addict themselves to an anti-social habit involving cocktails of chemicals where the long term affects are not known. They may look back on today’s high streets lined with vape shops with the same uncomprehending horror that we look back on the smoke-filled boozers of the 1970s.