A smoking section in a restaurant is as good as a pissing section in a swimming pool...
A nice little quiet debate on smoking I foresee...
Anyway, agreed 100%.
But only because the owner is too tight to install a decent air conditioning unit.
I know a few good restaurants here that allow smoking and don't have an incling of 'stray' smoke. You wouldn't know smoking was permitted in them, simply because they have monster A/Cs removing and replacing air constantly, winter and summer.
They work.
If they don't, then they're not big enough.
No crowds of outcasts lurking outside in the pouring rain either.
I'm a smoker and not too proud of it, and I don't smoke in restaurants. But smoking/non-smoking should be the decision of the owner not Whitehall. If people don't like others smoking in the restaurant they go to, then they should go to a non-smoking resaurant.
They will be banning smoking in your own home next (I don't smoke in my house either).
If smoking is so bad (and I agree that there's nothing good about it) then they should ban it altogether, and be prepared to lose the huge revenue coming from it.
Government want the money, but they also want to be nanny. Bloody hypocrites the lot of them.
On recent trips to London lately, the bedraggled hunched outside the pubs is a disgrace and a pathetic joke. Clearly by their numbers nobody can argue they're an insignificant minority.
Give 'em a pub to smoke in, 100% smokers, smoking staff and proper A/Cs. Avid non-smokers can stay away and go to the non-smoking pubs/restaurants.
Nobody values their freedom anymore.
The UK's gone bonkers.
(That should set off a few responses... I'll get my coat, to steal a phrase...)