UK Bans Smoking In Car If Under-18's Are Present
 

Drivers who smoke while carrying passengers under the age of 18 will face a £50 on-the-spot fine from October as a result of legislation passed this week.


Smoking in cars with children to be banned - Confused.com


630-ish out of touch MPs overwhelmingly vote to enable a cash grab :thumbsup

17 year old driver ferrying around your 17 year old pals who can legally smoke? That'll be £50 ($75) please, ker-ching! :pimp :pimp

I agree with it.

Makes sense.

next: ban on drinking alcohol around anyone under 18. That'll 'make sense' too I guess :)

what is the legal drinking age for UK? that should already be illegal in canada

not really the same though

i remember vividly how i hid under a blanket as a kid cause my father was smoking in the car and refused to open the window because he "would get a stiff neck"

so fuck smokers, this is a great law, fine should be 10 times higher

I fully agree with this. Should do the same over here.

18 to buy, other variations mean you can drink from 14 if eg out for a meal with family, no limit on drinking at home.

A proper comparison would have been banning drinking alcohol around anyone under 20

yeah that's a bit shitty, and I feel for you there mate. To take your personal experience out of the equation though, that's like saying you should ban drinking and/or being drunk around anyone under 18, because some people beat their kids while drunk.

At what point do you stop micro-managing people because of the few? Not a single smoker I know would not wind down windows if there's a non-smoker in the car, nor smoke with a small child in the car. Obviously that does happen, but again, to ban smoking with anyone under 18 (16 is legal to buy cigs) in the car, windows rolled down, is just a cash grab - albeit a clever one because of the emotions it stirs in people, as they immediately think of small kids being suffocated by smoke rather than a perfectly legal 17 year old smoker as a passenger.

Very very slippery slope.

we can debate if 16 would be a more appropriate age but smoking next to a child does harm the child under any circumstances - opposed to having a beer or wine

besides that - the point should not be how 17 year olds can legally smoke in a car, it should focus on why kids start smoking at that age and how to prevent that - like not selling cigarettes to anyone under 18.

Yeah, because that's the same thing. :error When someone drinks a beer next to a baby, the baby will get 15% of the beer in its body. :error

I doubt anyone would say smoking next to a child is harm-free, so that's a non-existent debate anyway. What I'm saying is, it's the 'we know best' brigade again... if you can explain to me how it's a good idea to give a fine to someone smoking next to a smoker of legal age, and how that won't open any kind of can of worms with regards as to someone else micro-managing every part of your life because of the 1% of idiots who will smoke next to kids in an enclosed space and refuse to open windows (generally speaking, that's in no way a personal dig at your dad btw), I'm all ears.

It's not about at 16 it's ok, at 15 it's not.. it's about the fact a law was brought in, that will penalise a legal smoker for smoking in their own car full of other legal smokers, because someone somewhere got emotional about small children having to endure 2nd hand smoke, and confusing it with a rational idea.

It's about lawmakers deciding they know what's best, and seeing how this goes, before pushing on and saying because you have 1 beer, your body/mind is impaired, and eg you cannot legally drink with an under 18 year old in the house in case of some danger like [insert case of random man who fell asleep after a beer and his 15 year old son did xyz here].

that doesn't bring in revenue :2 cents:

I know you aren't stupid, because I've seen your other posts, so why you can't see it's a comparison of perceived 'danger, save the children' rather than me saying 'here are 2 exact same things', I'll just put down to you being lazy today :winkwink:

Not to mention you don't see too many 17 year old babies these days.

I find it stupid. :2 cents:

yea, here it would be the legal drinking age.. you can't drink at home etc etc.. if you are older than the people that you're with, i believe you can still be nailed with 'enabling under age drinking', or whatever

fun note tho, the prime minister of the country had an under age drinker go to the hospital during a kid birthday party.. yet, no charges..

15% ? What are you doing to your baby when you are drunk ? :disgust

Do you know that passive smoking is as harmful (if not more) as normal smoking?
Not so much with alcohol fumes, lol.

100% great law.

can you tell the difference between a 17 year old and an 18 year old? Neither can the police... The law wasn't to target them, the cops will only pull people over when its clearly a child, because if they didn't it wouldn't be a cash grab it would be a complete waste of time.

This is about second-hand smoke, not about "perceived danger, save the children".

I won't drive with someone that is smoking. Too bad the average 10-year-old doesn't have that same choice.

lol, UK :1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

it's probably safer for children

I would ban smoking in public period

I'd like to see cops enforce traffic laws first...before handing out tickets for smokers in cars.

^^^^^this

People still smoke in cars?

yeah, as many, if not more, people die from 2nd hand smoke as smokers die from smoking related illness '_'

And alcohol was used, if you could actually read and comprehend comparisons, and be able to distinguish them from duplicates, to illustrate that many, many kids suffer beatings and physical harm from an older persons actions - call that '2nd hand drinking', if you will, seeings as it's not just kids that feel effects of an idiot drinker's actions. eg Drink driving is illegal because that driver damages others by his actions, not his alcohol fumes :upsidedow

I admire your optimism :thumbsup I absolutely do not share it though :Oh crap

2nde hand smoke is going to damage a 16 year old legal smoker, who may well also be smoking in the car? You've missed out that part, because of the emotions that 2nd hand smoke on others evokes. It's like the people who want porn banned because (rightly) it isn't good for kids to see, but it stirs up enough emotion with that 'someone think of the children' seed with those pro-ban porn people that they immediately think of a 5 year old exposed to porn instead of a 15/16/17 year old 'child'.

Tell me what damage 2nd hand smoke is going to cause a legal, 16 year old smoker in your car, with the windows rolled down, that it justifies a £50 on the spot fine? Are we really that mollycoddled a society these days?

I'm a smoker, so have no problem with that obviously, but yeah, I agree totally with the 2nd sentence, as do 99% of smokers. I don't need a fucking law fining me £50 if I have a 16 year old labourer who smokes in my van as a passenger to stop me from that commonsense approach though, and this is what I'm getting at, but apparently not conveying very well.

Playing loud music with a baby isn't a smart idea either, and will certainly damage their ears... should we pass a law with £50 on the spot fines if you have loud music in your vehicle with a voluntary 16 year old passenger in it?

If only you were in charge, we'd all be better off.

The law is there to protect kids from idiotic parents who decide to smoke in their cars while taking their kids from point A to point B.

Chances are, no one's going to give a crap about (read: not likely to enforce the law) 17 year olds smoking in the car.

You have the 20% "what about the extremes" cases under your microscope, I look at it from the practical, real life "how it's expected to be enforced for 80% of the cases" angle. Simple 80/20 is most likely to apply here as well.

I don't think this has anything to do with the pussification of society, instead I see this as much needed progression towards a more health conscious society (which I think the UK is in dire need of).

Just my two cents.

That's fair enough, and I do get that - I guess we differ on where we see things headed, and where lines should/shouldn't be drawn as far as gov't interference/micro-managing. History has shown that governments start with the inch before taking the mile, and what irks me the most is this: why isn't smoking illegal? This huge great horrible thing (that I wish I could quit) that's so bad, so damaging, is kept legal but used as a tool to grab more cash with the 'we are just trying to help' bs tacked on to it.

I'd be interested to see other's in this thread's view on banning say guns (*), because of the 1% that are too stupid to keep them out of kid's reach, or have a meltdown and decide today is a good day to have a massacre, etc.

As I keep attempting, and obviously failing, to iterate - this isn't me saying it's fine to smoke in a car with the windows rolled up when you have a 10 year old in the car, it's about the govt's latest cash grab (and anyone who thinks this won't be used as an excuse to stop any car with what appears to be anyone under 18 if the driver is smoking, to earn some money, is living in fantasy land - the old bill are going to have a field day pulling over teenagers in hot hatches with a car full of their mates, even if they are the greatest teenagers around on their way to a movie, whatever) and how far they'll twist the 'for the safety of children', or 'national security', or 'war on drugs', or 'war on terror', or whatever other spin they can put on something to make it more acceptable to the masses, when it comes to earning a few quid :2 cents:

* or more to the point, dishing out on the spot fines. Why a fine? Why not a charge of endangerment or some such? Because that involves more work, and less ROI. The whole fining thing means someone who is a rich but asshole father, can smoke as often as he wants with a 2 year old child in the car, and just pay the fine each time he's caught. With govt's, there's ALWAYS an angle, and as per usual, in this case it's about $$$.

offshoot of this, is do we really need to fuck with natural selection/darwin's law here? From a completely unemotional standpoint of the fact there are too many humans on earth as it is, let alone in say 20 years time, do we really want laws to make every facet of life more health conscious, so as the dumb fuck 1% who would actually need a law like this in the first place can live longer/breed more? Next up, laws about calories you can give anyone under the age of 5? How large a slice of cake is legally allowed to be for 9 year olds? :winkwink:

That's a bit of a tongue-in-cheek way of playing devil's advocate, but kinda still stands :upsidedow

People still smoke?
Guess someone has to prove Darwin right.

Personally I've never understood why it was ever safe or legal to start lighting up in a metal box full of petrol, full stop. But as Jel has shown yet again the clueless bastards that make the laws in this country can't even think through the most basic of consequences.
They want to ban smoking, they want to stop you boozing, they want to stop you making porn. BUT they don't have the balls to do it outright so they start all this bullshit tinkering. That's why ATVOD exists. The Tories coined the phrase regarding Labour back in 2001 "stealth taxes". What you have now in the UK is "stealth communism".

**Disclaimer, I am a lifelong Tory voter but will not be voting for them in 2015. I will only vote "AT ALL" if there is a chance that UKIP might kick out my local LABOUR MP.

I get where you are coming from Jel, the govt will soon be asking us for a daily stool sample to check we are eating what they tell us to do.

If you smoke near me, not only do I hope the gov't will be asking for a daily stool sample, I hope that they will be personally retrieving the sample straight out of your butt with a pair of rusty forceps.

As long as the public is convinced that cigarettes give you cancer. Real ban should be on having open fires in households as you can inhale tobacco smoke try do it with any other plant. Many other timbers or foliage will produce far more toxic gases that will do far more harm. Either you have cancer genes ready to mutate or you don't. As a comfort thing i can agree on the ban with any passenger regardless of age but to be convinced it is going to kill them i am not.

EXACTLY.

Me and my sisters had to breathe through our clothes or coats to even get some air.
I already had Asthma bad and both step parents were chain smokers. The windows would run Yellow when sprayed with windex....

WHY you so scared or against it if 99% of Smokers agree and don't do it...

LIES....

Great law! Sad there needs to be one to encourage common sense.

That would be lovely. At the very least in closed spaces. I do miss going out to a restaurant and not smelling like an ashtray at the end of the night.