I have recently returned from a holiday in Berlin, a civilised city with a respected culture; clean streets with frequent refuse services; cheap, efficient integrated public transport, a complete absence of aggressive, baseball-capped thugs marauding the streets; and without dog faeces every ten metres.

However, in Berlin, people smoke in bars and restaurants without comment. Oh dear.

I returned to Brighton, which is, in most respects, the opposite of Berlin, in that it sometimes resembles a Third World shanty town, to find that in our never-ending pursuit of irrelevant ephemera, Brighton and Hove City Council has coerced pubs into banning smoking at the bar. Not the pub yet, but the bar, as if a magic airlock existed.

I also find to my amazement that Liverpool, a city with historical problems of poverty, unemployment and social injustice is to squander much-needed resources on a dash to be first to ban smoking throughout.

The decision of a number of middle-class people to make smoking their single political obsession is one thing. The disgracefully craven and duplicitous behaviour of the authorities in bowing to the pressure from this lobby to criminally waste taxpayers' money on a minor issue is another.

The figure of 1,000 deaths from passive smoking is an oft-quoted statistic.

Some 5,000 a year are dying from super bugs in hospitals, places they have to be, unlike the danger areas for passive smoking.

This situation is still being fudged despite clear evidence of simple

solutions. Shame on us for our typically English hypocrisy. The urge of the middle classes to dictate other peoples' behaviour could be productively focused on any number of areas but the need to demonise proved, as usual, too great.

This is yet another example of our completely skewed priorities. We have an infrastructure and social structure which are falling apart and we throw yet more money away on decorative fringe issues.

We seem to have given up on attempts to civilise ourselves.

Sadly, we will continue to fall behind the standards of our European neighbours, who look on in bemusement as we continue our inexorable progress down the U bend.

Simon Dalton

-Brighton