Nice weather for it

Random observation:

When the UK introduced the smoking ban, I honestly expected lots of people to just simply disregard it. Yet they did not, at least not in the pubs that I drink in (which aren't ruff as shit, but aren't exactly upper-class or anything).

It might have something to do with when the ban was introduced, which was July.

A few facts about July^[1]:

It's one of the hottest months, as are August and September.
It gets dark later than most months, as do August and September.
It's drier than most months, as are August and September.

June is also a nice month weather-wize, but not as hot, gets darker a bit earlier, and is wetter.

Had the government introduced the law in, say, November, I'm sure that more people would have smoked inside: new law, pissing it down, bugger that lets just smoke inside, fuck off pigs, etc.

A semi-detailed assessment of this plan is quite interesting:

Strait-off the bat, lots of people would have resisted: you have three months to allow them to rack-up enough warnings to justify a 'final warning', and during these three months most people won't resist as they don't mind going outside too much in nice weather.

Three months later, you've got a new set of rebels as the weather has turned bad, BUT these people cannot rely on the support of the original (instantly-rebellious) people, as their landlords have earned their 'final warning'. This is less draconian than actually legislating that a land-lord will instantly lose his licence on his first offence, but acts the same for a large number of land-lords when it counts, i.e. they've reached that point when the weather turns bad and lots of other land-lords are considering rebelling.

Hence, you get a smaller group resisting when the weather turns bad. You've now got a few months before it starts snowing to ensure that this group is also 'fairly' given a few warnings, so that, come the snow, the number of pubs that say 'bollocks to that, it's snowing, just smoke inside' is much smaller than you'd expect.

In other words, it divides and conquers the pubs by allowing land-lords to resist, and get to the draconian 'do it and you'll have your licence (i.e., livelyhood) revoked' point, in spurts rather than all at once.

By giving the land lords a few warnings (when the gov' can afford to be light-handed, i.e. before the next group of people start resisting) the gov' appear fair and less heavy-handed, even tho forcing compliance by threatening -- at the right time -- to take away their licence if they disobey even one (more) time is an integral part of the plan: when it matters -- when their resistance would have an effect because they'd be resisting with many other people -- they can't, because doing so would result in an insta-ban. But, if called on it, the gov' can say 'we gave them numerous warnings' and seem fair...

Now, had they spent about 5 months obeying, but trying to whip up support against the ban, then all resisted at once in December, maybe people wouldn't have accepted the law just because it had been 'unchallenged' for 5 months, and there'd have been a lot more people resisting at once...

Or, y'know, if the government had tried to pass this law in November... which is probably why they didn't.