The Member for Ealing North

But, of course, the most amusing and perhaps the most important speech during the Health Bill debate was made by Stephen Pound (he's the one in the red, left), the Member for Ealing North.

Below are the extracts which especially struck and tickled How Ridiculous.

Stephen Pound: A number of my colleagues are already asking how the Whips want them to vote on the free vote, but for once we are able to make a decision without any of the normal party-political baggage....

Every morning I used to rise and have a reflective cigarette; then I would have breakfast and a cigarette; then I would say my prayers, but remember what my good Jesuit confessor said: "You should never ever smoke while you are praying, but you can pray while you are smoking." I would then get on a bus and leap like a lithe gazelle to the upper deck, where I would have a couple of Players Weights before jumping off. By the time I got to primary school, I could, as ashtray monitor, go to the staff room and pick up a few dog-ends.

Lynne Jones rose—

Stephen Pound: On the subject of fag-ends, I will certainly give way to my hon. Friend.

Stephen Pound: The first is the pure libertarian view, eloquently expressed by the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan) in his famous book, which is compulsory bedside reading for many of us, that everything should be allowed. That is a legitimate intellectual argument.

The second option is the counter-argument that everything should be banned. Tobacco is bad for people—ban it. Cars are bad for people—ban them. Alcohol is bad for people—ban the lot. Ban everything, and we will subsist on a milk toast diet of muesli as we shuffle through the empty streets of our city, looking for a little stimulation where we may find it.

Those are both perfectly legitimate intellectual arguments: everything bad is banned; everything bad is allowed. Or, we can opt for—dare I say it?—co-existence and compromise. Instead of concentrating on what divides us, let us concentrate on what unites us. Would it not be possible—

Frank Dobson (Holborn and St. Pancras) (Lab): To become a Cameronian?

Stephen Pound: I am more of a Cameroonian—a fan of Samuel Eto'o.

Why should it not be possible for those of us who wish to do so to go to our Royal British Legion, where the staff are happy and prepared to work, and where the members are happy and prepared to enter, to have our cigarette and our pint? Others prefer the smoke-free sushi bars of—I was going to say Primrose Hill, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson) is in his place, and I do not wish to embarrass him. Why cannot we have the choice? It would be sensible to step back a little as putative legislators and accept that sometimes simply banning something does not make it disappear.

Lembit Öpik (Montgomeryshire) (LD) rose—

Stephen Pound: On the subject of those things that one would not wish to ban, I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

Earlier, I mentioned the smoke-free cowl on the Upper Committee Corridor, but now I refer the House to the dystopic hell—"Hernando's Hideaway"—that is the smoking room on the Library Corridor. It is like the "Raft of the Medusa" most nights, with great groups of people crammed into it. The air there is a little much even for my fragile lungs.

We need sanity and sense. This debate has stirred great emotions, but talking about dead bodies littering the streets, adopting an absolute position and saying that smoking will disappear if it is banned are not good ways to approach the matter. We must accept the reality of tobacco's existence and try to mitigate the nuisance and annoyance that it causes. We must protect young people from tobacco smoke and stop them taking up smoking, but for heaven's sake we must not make matters much worse by introducing legislation that Draco the lawgiver would have felt was too extreme.