And I agree with your agreement. Isn’t this nice! I also think the smoking ban is totalitarian and invasive.

I just wonder if the ban has created an increased desire for non-smoking pubs and thus created an environment where the ban could be lifted and still meet everyone’s desires.

Survey methodology affects results; the order in which questions are asked is very significant. Without buying and reading all 26 volumes of the report, I don’t know how much to trust the headline results.

The authors highlight the issue of “civic duty” and intention to vote amongst young people. I’d like to know how that question was framed, given that Citizenship is a compulsory subject in UK schools. Perhaps the young people made an informed decision to declare themselves as non-voters?

e.g. Under the tories, people thought not enough was spent on the welfare state. Labour spent more on it, and now people think too much has been spent.

Also a fair point I think. This has certainly happened in the US.

I’m not trying to derail the thread unless the title was intended to be ironic.

I agree. And that’s fine. And they were free to be non smoking before the ban.

What is not fine is the state dictating what its citizens are allowed to do and what a landlord may allow on his own property (even if the govrnment can persuade a majority of the population to support their tyranny).

That is err….totalitarian.

On the radio this evening, a commentator suggested that increased acceptance of homosexuality reflects change of age demographics. In contradiction, I’ve seen reports that many older people with experience of WWII and national conscription are more tolerant of homosexuality than their younger peers. Today the tolerant people will be aged 70 to 90 years, and will be less numerous than in the 1983 sample that Don uses for comparison. So perhaps in this example, the UK is becoming more tolerant; older gay respecters are being replaced by a bigger group of tolerant younger people?

I suspect that there is more to the change than I suggest. Can anyone point me to an analysis of attitudes by age group over time?

Having had the smoking ban, I wonder now, if it was to be revoked how many pubs would make themselves non-smoking purely for commercial reasons. I suspect that quite a few of them would remain non-smoking.

Perhaps people just changed their minds?

I was against the smoking ban when it came in. I now think I was wrong, and support it.

Q. From the stats above, more than 25% of the population changed their minds prior to the ban. Why?

A. Because they are sheep.

That is what is so dispiriting. At the risk of invoking Godwins Law…….

I agree. It seems that if you’re starting to find yourself poorer then you’re not as keen to see the little money you have spread about.

Services that you might actually use yourself on the other hand…

“Nevertheless, the proportion willing to say that taxes and spending on health and education should be cut is still less than one in ten (8%).”

Perhaps they’re unaware of the alternatives. I’m not sure I’d want to see a reduction in health and education spending if a free market alternative was absent. Inefficient schools and hospitals are certainly a better proposition than not having them at all.

Perhaps people just changed their minds?

I was against the smoking ban when it came in. I now think I was wrong, and support it.

I too would be surprised not to find a marked overlap between those two statistics, but I’m inclined to think that its more likely to be a direct function of age than anything else.

How utterly dispiriting.

A clear example of the power of government propaganda- a socially engineered confidence trick kindled by fake charities and delivered by the supine and willing media.

They actually convinced over half our population that the misery they were about to inflict was for their own good- that four legs were, indeed, better than two.

As C.S.Lewis spotted

“a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Gin and tonic anyone?

That’s an entirely fair point – my original draft qualified that statement significantly – “it would be interesting to do further research to see whether there is an overlap between…”

Equally, I would be astonished if there didn’t turn out to be significant overlap between people holding one view and people holding the other, or if the total number of people who believed (mothers with young children shouldn’t work) or (relations between two adults of the same sex are always or mostly wrong) ended up being greater than 50%.

I’m not a tory troll, honest, but that suggestion is unfounded without further correlational tests which have not been reported in your post. You can’t leap down the throats of other bloggers who don’t really understand statistics and then make silly suggestions using only descriptive data.

e.g. Under the tories, people thought not enough was spent on the welfare state. Labour spent more on it, and now people think too much has been spent.

One of the most significant changes in the overall pattern of marriage and family formation over the last forty years has been the almost total demise of the ‘shotgun wedding’

Off the top of my head, at the end of the 1960′s, at least 70% of unmarried women under 20 who fell pregnant got married before their child was born. Today, children both to women under 20 within 8 months of marriage account for around 1% of the annual number of births in that age group.

The same pattern is evident in other age groups, as well, although the extent to which the number of marriage precipitated by pregnancy has fallen changes from group to group.

What that tells us that a child born into a married union is far more likely to be the result of planned pregnancy in which the parents have thought through and planned for the changes that come with parenthood, while cohabiting couples are far more likely to to have conceived ‘accidentally’ and without any preparation of prior consideration of what it mean to become parents.

The so-called ‘marriage bonus’ exists primarily because married couples are a self-selecting group not because marriage has any kind of magical effect on the stability and longevity of a relationship.

The trend towards cohabitation rather than marriage just removes the less successful couples from the marriage equation, which is why policies that attempt to artificially induce couples to marry aren’t worth pursuing. All they actually do is push up the divorce rate and reduce the apparent scale of the so-called ‘marriage bonus’ because its no more than a statistical artefact that groups like the CSJ don’t control for in research because it doesn’t suit their preconceived views of morality.

There’s more shit talked in research papers on marriage than in just about any other field of social policy research.

“45% agree that it ‘makes no difference to children whether their parents are married to each other or just living together”

That’s not what the stats say :

“Children born into married unions are estimated to be twice as likely as those born into cohabiting unions to spend their entire childhood with both natural parents (70% versus 36%)”

Ah, but you’ve just assumed that “spend[ing] their entire childhood with both natural parents” “makes [a] difference”. Admittedly, not spending my entire childhood with both natural parents (despite the fact that they were married) did make a difference – but it was undoubtedly a positive one in my case. Parents staying together is only a good thing if they’re not making their children’s (and each other’s) lives miserable by doing so.