Extend the smoking ban or approve a holocaust

The rabbits changed after myxomatosis struck. Within just two years, 95 per cent had died. Those that survived were no longer so cute, Tennyson's bunny "fondling its own harmless face". These days rabbits are larger and more feral, no longer living sociably in cosy warrens.

A similar change seems to have overtaken smokers since the smoking ban of 2007. The remaining smokers are now much more aggressive.

Having been prevented from indulging in their workplaces, they now inhale their poison with a kind of vengeful fury as soon as they can.

So one perverse result of the ban is that there is much more smoking visible on the streets than there used to be. It is not a pretty sight.

Smokers seem to be physically sucking on their ciggies with a new sort of vehemence. It's hardcore now.

Outside every office, shop and pub, non-smokers have to run a gauntlet of such smokers. We don't enjoy it.

Yet another poll has just revealed that two out of three people believe the smoking ban should be extended to outdoor public areas.

That's always the result, a straightforward reflection of the proportion of non-smokers in the population. Smokers have no allies at all among non-smokers.

In parts of America, such bans have already been introduced. In much of California, smoking has been banned in state parks, in playgrounds and on beaches.

In New York, some landlords are forbidding tenants to smoke not only in their apartments but also on the sidewalks around their building. Further legislation is under discussion.

A more extensive ban will eventually come here, too - for the changes in anti-smoking legislation are on a ratchet system, progressing only one way.

It now seems simply bizarre that people used to be allowed to smoke in planes, on the Tube, in hospitals, offices and restaurants.

In time, it will seem equally improbable that they could once do so with impunity in the faces of people sharing public space outside.

The arguments may no longer be about the dangers of secondary smoking but they are no less compelling. It's not just that they smell so terrible and throw their butts everywhere.

When you see a smoker, sucking in hard as soon as he or she gets to the threshold, what you are seeing is not just addiction but self-harming of the most terrible kind. Half of all regular smokers are killed by their habit.

No other vice, not even drinking to excess, is so directly and inherently suicidal. We would not find it acceptable to see people routinely setting fire to themselves in public.

Yet that is precisely what smoking in public is equivalent to. Children should not grow up thinking that's normal.

Properly understood, smoking is a moral affront every time. So long as we smile on it, we are approving a holocaust.

One that happens in slow motion, perhaps, but is nonetheless a colossal slaughter: every year, 114,000 people in Britain are killed by smoking. Nearly all of us have lost friends or family to it.

Slowly, slowly, smoking is disappearing. In 1974, nearly half the adult population smoked. Now it is only one in five of us.

It will go. But we can show right now that we don't find it an acceptable sight any more.