Tomorrow, smokers pass into the twilight zone. Banned from enjoying tobacco in public places and spaces, they will be hounded by nosy-parkers and busy-bodies and subject to hefty fines for dropping their stogies in the street.

You don't think so? Bradford's own David Hockney was taken to task by a couple of girls for lighting up in a public park, according to a Sunday newspaper magazine. His response was not recorded.

The Draconian law won't affect the cannabis tokers and cocaine snorters of London's metroland, of course. The privileged sons and daughters of MPs, civil servants, educationalists and entertainers of all sorts, will go on either boozing or smacking themselves to death in a post-Aldous Huxley pursuit of personal happiness. The easily indulged are rarely gratified.

Meanwhile Hockney - his father Kenneth was a passionate anti-smoker - who returned to England to paint and smoke at peace with himself, now finds himself the de facto defender of smokers. In the same magazine article he declared that he really hated our new Prime Minister for being narrow-minded, despotic, in short anti-libertarian.

Gordon Brown, to my knowledge, has not ventured an opinion on the subject of smoking; but as First Among Equals, he symbolises the body of laws that have come to pass since New Labour avalanched into office in 1997.

You can almost hear the exasperation in the Cabinet Office. "Why don't they understand what we're trying to do! Don't they want to be healthy, wealthy (relatively) and wise to the Tories? They've never had it so good!"

If you read Andrew Marr's History of Britain, which accompanies his recent BBC series, you'll discover that Clem Attlee's post-war Labour Government suffered from a similar collective delusion - at least according to Mr Marr.

"Back in the Forties, Labour's idea of Britain was beginning to take shape. This would be a well-disciplined, austere country, organised from London by dedicated public servants, who in turn directed a citizenry which was dignified and restrained. Sanitation, reason, officialdom and fairness; it was a Roundhead vision without the compulsory psalms and military dictatorship.

"Unfortunately for Labour, the real country was nothing like this. It was (and is) a more disordered, self-pleasuring, individualistic place. Labour's ethic was about restraint and fair shares. Ministers viewed consumerism with disdain, a personality defect of Americans. Yet consumerism would soon erupt with a strength never known before."

Marr has a pretty sensible, unromantic view of the British as a nation. Though phlegmatic and easygoing by nature, once roused we can be bloody awkward. Churchill was not alone in being shocked by being tossed aside so decisively by the voters in 1945; the Americans didn't believe it either. Attlee delivered the Welfare State and was then pushed out in favour of Churchill's Conservatives.

Tread too hard on their corns and the British are liable to go to the extremes of voting for a female Prime Minister who offers them tax cuts and lots of other jolly freedoms. The people who voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 were the offspring of those who had voted for Clement Attlee, the Welfare State and nationalisation of the mines and the railways in 1945.

The purpose of culture and civilisation is to fertilise the collective memory; but when appetite is pitted against memory, appetite will usually win every time. Even a well-fed man finds it hard to resist the salt and vinegar aromas from a fish and chip shop.

David Hockney may have lived too long among the Hollywood hills. "Who's complaining?" the 69-year-old painter huffs and puffs in disbelief, as the forces of political correctness seemingly snip away at one liberty after another. It's as though the bolshie British of his smoky Bradford youth have given up.

When I first met Hockney in 1985 at Bradford's erstwhile National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, his favourite hobby horse was the UK licensing laws. He wanted to know why no-one could get a drink when they wanted. Well, now they can. The same Government so punitive against smokers has turned Britain into a boozers' paradise.

If few people are complaining perhaps the answer is that too many of them are incapable through alcohol. Others can't be bothered because they have no intention of obeying the anti-smoking laws anyway. To judge by a conversation that I overheard on a morning train into Forster Square the other day, occasional social smokers are likely to pack it in simply to save themselves from hassle.

But once sold on the idea of choice in all things - doctors, hospitals, schools, public utilities, consumer goods - people naturally pick and choose which laws they want to obey.

They put two fingers up at the poll tax and that change in the law quickly vanished. Some choose to avoid paying road tax. Some avoid paying rail fares. I have watched certain others avoid paying £3 for an afternoon of Bradford League cricket - pretending they rushed out, jumped in the car and forgot to bring money with them. And what about the twisters who fraudulently claim welfare payments or avoid paying tax on earnings?

Others dutifully pay their bills only to find that if they ever do fail to, say, renew the TV licence on time, they are immediately threatened with prosecution and a fine of £1,000. The letter never acknowledges that in the past this has not been a problem. In other words, there are a lot of dutiful citizens who are treated so dismissively that they feel like breaking the law.

They feel disenfranchised, forever trying to deal with faceless bureaucrats or the hidden technocracies of call centres and unaccountable quangos. Perhaps they have a job in which they are obliged to fulfil centrally-created targets at variance with day-to-day realities. Protect the weak and you risk the strong arm of the law falling on your neck, for the police too have targets to meet. Are we subjects, citizens or consumers? Judging by letters columns of newspapers, many feel like a soulless combination of all three.

David Hockney's perception that personal liberty has been seriously eroded would doubtless find a great deal of eager assent among smokers and non-smokers alike. And yet one of the things that makes people hottest under the collar is the European Act of Human Rights, which defends things like Habeas Corpus from politicians forever warning us that more repressive laws are necessary to defend us against terrorists.

The nanny state gets our goat, it always has and it always will. De Gaulle recognised this when he rejected our application to join the Common Market. The British were mavericks, temperamentally ill-suited to the technocracy of a federation of European states. We laugh at libertarians who try to abolish liberty in the name of a greater collective good.

Andrew Marr cites Ernest Bevin, Clement Attlee's unpretentious Foreign Secretary, who once told a group of Americans: "If I believed the development of Socialism meant the absolute crushing of liberty, then I should plump for liberty because the advance of human development depends entirely on the right to think, to speak, and to use reason, and allow for what I call the upsurge to come from the bottom to reach the top."

Freedom is indivisible: it confers the right to live a low life as well as the right to live high-mindedly. It embraces selfishness and altruism, both of which found parallel voices in the mid-1980s in the shape of Harry Enfield's character Loadsamoney and Live Aid.

The law of unforeseen consequences kicks in even for prime ministers. Andrew Marr's summation of Margaret Thatcher's revolution is right.

"She did not believe in privatising industries or defeating inflation for merely economic reasons. She wanted to remoralise society, creating a nation whose Victorian values were expressed through secure marriages, self-reliance and savings, good neighbourliness and hard workYet Thatcherism heralded an age of unparalleled consumption, credit, show-off wealth, quick bucks and sexual libertinismWhen you free people, you can never be sure what you are freeing them for."

Unrestrained freedom and unrestrained government are both to be avoided: they are different sides of the same coin. Freedom can be tyrannical too if it is wilfully imposed and unwillingly received.

Stamping down on smokers is a big mistake; the consequences are bound to come out in another, unexpected, way. If tobacco is as lethal as those who love to preach the apocalypse claim, why doesn't the Government simply ban it? Drunks are far more dangerous than smokers. I have seen drunks fight; I have yet to see smokers attack someone for a cigarette or even an ounce of shag. Yet there is no plan to return to the licensing law restraints of David Hockney's youth.

On the subject of fighting, will the smoking ban extend to British subjects in public places serving in Her Majesty's Armed Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq? The question is rhetorical.

Before anyone asks, I gave up smoking voluntarily in March, 2003.