My theory for what it’s worth is that this is the kind of

My theory, for what it’s worth, is that this is the kind of scare people actually enjoy because they can blame the Government and don’t have to inconvenience themselves, except by making an extra trip to the hypermarket in their SUVs to lay in supplies of expensively bottled water. Before anyone says or writes another word about the terrible things bird flu might do to us, I’d like an assurance that they don’t smoke, have unprotected sex or eat junk food, just so I know that they’re capable of sensibly assessing risk.
The real health scandal, which didn’t produce big headlines last week, is that every dirty, polluted breath we take in this country is shortening our lives – by an average of eight months, according to an official study. The cause, ministers admit, is air pollution from car exhausts, factories and homes, which is still having “a marked effect on our health”. This won’t be news to anyone who has observed the haze of chemical smog that sometimes covers British cities or suffered the effects, such as acute sinusitis or bronchitis.During Labour’s first term in office, I had a perplexing exchange with a junior minister, who was defending the Government’s ban on cigarette advertising. Quite right, I said, but what about adverts for cars? That was different, he told me, because secondhand smoke affects the health of non-smokers, whereas we can choose not to drive. When I pointed out that non-drivers still have to breathe toxic exhaust fumes, he looked dumbstruck.

(And yes, I do have a small car, but I try not to drive more than 3,000 miles a year.)The website of NHS Direct is frank about the connection between atmospheric pollution and ill health. One of the causes of bronchitis is breathing a polluted atmosphere; to be more specific, chemical irritants such as environmental or industrial pollutants damage cells in the lungs, as well as causing the glands in the air passages to produce too much mucus. The Government knows this, as do we, yet ministers continue to have an Augustinian attitude to a problem that might be summed up as “Make us green, Lord – but not yet.”Last week, responding to the latest grim report, all the Government could come up with was a weedy plan to make things a bit better by 2020 – that’s 14 years from now, for God’s sake, and the aim is only to increase average life expectancy by three months. Ben Bradshaw, the latest in a long line of environment ministers who have announced targets and initiatives since 1997, admitted that air pollution is not declining “as quickly as expected”, although I don’t know why he expected anything else.The Government has never been anything like tough enough about reducing harmful emissions. Like any political party operating under a democratic system, Labour knows that clean air is achievable only by all of us making radical changes in our lifestyles, and it fears the consequences at the ballot box of saying so. So we can carry on buying new cars, driving to out-of-town superstores, clogging up urban streets in SUVs, using patio heaters and flying to Prague and back for £14.99. Now let’s get on with something really important, like fretting over avian flu

More from Joan Smith.

Over the coming months we’ll be inundated with cheap paperbacks as former punks (now nearing their fifties) cash in on that brief moment when anarchy was in the air, safety-pins were in your nose, a swastika was stencilled on your forearm and gobbing the fashionable form of greeting. But when is the official anniversary of this brief spurt of musical hyperactivity, which ended at the end of 1977?

It seems to have started in New York, at a club called CBGB in the winter and spring of 1975. Punk magazine was launched the next year, promoting bands like the Ramones. But things really took off in the UK on Valentine’s day that year when the Sex Pistols played at Andrew Logan’s Valentine’s Ball. After about 10 minutes Johnny Rotten’s microphone broke, a fight broke out and it ended in a punch-up.
At the time I was presenting a TV series for young people on Sunday lunchtimes, The London Weekend Show. I met and “interviewed” the Clash, the Pistols, the Buzzcocks, Poly Styrene and Siouxsie and the Banshees long before they were signed by record companies. It takes a lot to scare me – spiders, rats, eels, nights in the jungle and solitary walking aren’t a problem.