Not all journos think the smoking ban is a good thing.

So what if the smoking ban stopped you smoking? It's not the Government's role to give you willpower

Brendan O'Neill writing in the Telegraph about so called, 'Surrogate willpower' that the Government has decided it needs to force on us.

In essence, the state is cheered for exercising “surrogate willpower”. I didn’t make that phrase up. It appears in a Cabinet Office document titled Influencing Behaviour Through Public Policy, published in 2010. Proposing that officials should do more to improve people’s health, the document says “government can act as surrogate willpower… helping us to do what we want to but can’t do”. The presumption is that people are childlike, incapable of making sensible decisions, irrational. Indeed, the document says “people are sometimes seemingly irrational” and thus it falls to government to “change their behaviour”.

Go read the whole thing. It's worth it.