What would happen, I wonder, were we to rescind the smoking ban as Nigel Farage wants? My guess is not much. Most restaurants would keep the existing rules. Some pubs might set aside a room for smokers. Casinos, comedy clubs and jazz clubs might revert to the status quo ante. But would we return to a time where people routinely smoked everywhere? Unlikely. People have had the chance to experience a new version of normal, and in large part they prefer it.
You wouldn’t expect me to say this, but I think the legislation has to be considered good precisely because, even if it were abolished, much of the behaviour it created would stick. The same goes for seatbelt legislation. The law was normative — it served to create new habits and conventions which then became self-sustaining.
Good laws can make a habit easier to adopt by making it universal (the Greek word for ‘law’ — nomos — also means ‘custom’ or ‘social norm’. And even obviously sensible behaviours can be hard to adopt when they are abnormal. The only time I never wear a seatbelt is in the back of a London taxi: this is because buckling up in a cab is counter to the norm. Yet if there is one place you should wear seatbelts, it is in a black cab, where any sudden deceleration will hurl you five feet forwards into the glass partition.
In the same way, many norms work only when everyone conforms to them. Think of the white lines in a car park. Though purist Libertarians might claim these interfere with your right to park at the diagonal, everyone generally obeys them. This conformity matters, since if only one person parks across two bays, the entire system breaks down.
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