My Lords, I am a non-smoker but having been in your Lordships’ House for some years one thing that concerns me about this measure is the unintended consequences. One is always worried in this House about them and so we should be. It seems very odd that so few people have expressed the view that tobacco is a legal product. How can you interfere with the marketing and the sales of a legal product? I think the product is undesirable and the arguments of the scientific community about its danger to health are indisputable. However, we have to think rather carefully about what may follow. If you get away with this without too much protest there are all kinds of bien pensants and vigorous politically correct people who will seek to do various things. For example, it could happen quite easily that in some local authority someone of limited life experience might suggest that, with obesity and the compulsion that people have to eat too much, it might be a good idea to prevent restaurants allowing people to eat on the pavement under an awning because that attracts people to sample the restaurant’s delicious wares. Noble Lords may think that this is a trivial, Clarksonesque point, but it bears thinking about.

I am grateful for the efforts that have been made to curb the ill effects of smoking. I am a frequent cinema goer—I have been a film buff since I was a boy. I do not think I would be talking to noble Lords today if they had not banned smoking in cinemas. I may have a husky voice, but I would probably be dead by now, I should think. These are things that have to be considered.

In the speeches so far, there has been scant respect for one thing that is very important to this country, and I hope it will be borne out in the speeches during the election campaign. This is a trading country, and trading countries require freedom in order to encourage the production of goods, to sell them and to market them correctly. If you do not like smoking, then ban it, for heaven’s sake. Do not try to pretend that this is going to deal with it—it is not going to deal with it. We have already seen the unintended consequences on the streets. In some of our best streets in the West End of London you see cigarette ends everywhere because people are smoking at lunchtime in doorways, smoking in the open air and smoking in groups; they are also smoking in their homes because it is unsatisfactory outside so that the smoke filters through badly constructed walls.

There are all kinds of aspects of this whole problem which have not been properly addressed, and I do not think that packaging is the answer. Should the noble Lord who introduced this amendment guide us towards the Lobbies, I shall follow him.