It’s senseless to argue with people who say that this legislation isn’t the thin end of the wedge. In the four years that I have been writing about these issues, I have given enough examples of the slippery slope for all but the most wilfully ignorant to see how it works. This week, it was grimly amusing to hear people denying that the slippery slope exists while citing the law enforcing the wearing of seat belts in cars as a precedent for banning smoking in cars. If they knew their history, they would know that their proposal was just the kind of thing MPs had in mind when they warned of mission creep during the parliamentary debate on mandatory seat belts in 1979.
