Employees will be told they could be covered by the health and safety at work acts to stop smoking in small offices.There will be no ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants, but owners will be urged to provide more smoke-free zones.. Family doctors will be encouraged to run clinics to help smokers stop, by issuing nicotine patches and chewing gum at cut-price rates, instead of the across-the-counter price of pounds 6 a pack.The measures will be aimed particularly at those on low incomes, who have proved resistant to health warnings about the dangers of smoking.Ministers feared making nicotine gum and patches generally available on prescription would be too expensive.Curbs on smoking in the workplace will be included in the package. Ian Greer Associates, the now defunct lobbying company which crashed after being implicated in the allegations of Tory cash-for-questions, also lobbied for Skoal Bandits before they were banned in this country.The Conservatives were also handed key advertising posters sites reserved for the tobacco industry before the 1992 election campaign.The Tories have said they will respond to curbs on advertising on their merits, but the party's former spokesman on health, John Maples, said an EU-wide ban on all forms of tobacco advertising was ``an unnecessary and potentially unworkable piece of legislation".Mr Dobson and Tessa Jowell, the Public Health minister, will also accuse the tobacco industry of targeting young people with their campaigns.They will propose new curbs on using fashion brand names to advertise cigarettes, and propose a wide range of measures to help smokers give up the habit. More discreet payments have been made including pounds 4,000 towards the right wing think-tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, by BAT Industries.Baroness Thatcher is also a consultant to Philip Morris, manufacturer of Marlboro. But it is expected that some Tory MPs will oppose Britain replacing the voluntary code with a compulsory ban.Although ministers are vulnerable over allowing sponsorship of Formula One racing by tobacco companies to continue until 2006, the Government is prepared to use the Labour dossier which names Kenneth Clarke, the former Chancellor, as the most prominent Tory link with the tobacco industry.Mr Clarke, a former health secretary, is the deputy chairman of British American Tobacco, a post thought to pay at least pounds 75,000 a year.The leading spokesman for the Tobacco Manufacturers Association is John Carlisle, the former outspoken right-wing Tory MP.The dossier claims that the Tories received donations totalling pounds 100,000 before the 1992 general election from Rothmans. Senior Whitehall sources have told The Independent that they will attack prominent Conservatives for their close links with tobacco companies if the Tories try to oppose the proposals which Frank Dobson, the Secretary of State for Health, will outline in a White Paper. The Government is implementing an EU directive banning tobacco advertising on poster sites by 2000, a year ahead of the maximum allowed by the European agreement.

The level of fines suggested - pounds 2,000 per illegal immigrant - could put some smaller truck firms out of business, he added.But Mr Straw, writing in the News of the World, said almost 5,000 people were found hidden in freight vehicles in the first eight months of this year.. HEALTH MINISTERS are prepared to use a Labour Party dossier on the Tories' links with the tobacco industry to back its plans this week for a ban on tobacco advertising. ROAD HAULIERS yesterday hit back at Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, over plans to fine the drivers of lorries used by illegal immigrants. Mr Straw said yesterday that drivers could virtually stop the stowaways overnight if they carried out simple checks on their trucks. And he said he would go ahead with plans to fine truckers pounds 2,000 if illegal immigrants are found on their vehicles.The Road Haulage Association, representing lorry firms, condemned the plans as "outrageous and unworkable"."You don't need to be a genius to work out that if hauliers are about to be fined every time they voluntarily approach the authorities and disclose the presence of illegal immigrants, they will simply resort to releasing the illegal immigrants without informing the police," a spokesman said.He said the association still hoped to change ministers' minds. They believe that John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, has been given assurances by Tony Blair that he will be involved in the final decisions, which the MPs regard as another reassurance that past pledges will be kept.In a separate move, Harriet Harman, the former Social Security secretary, will also urge the Government to help fund more generous provisions for parental leave.In her first moves since being sacked from the Cabinet, she will table a Commons motion today with Chris Pond, the Labour MP and former director of the Low Pay Unit, welcoming government action but making it clear that they want to see more financial help for parents taking leave to care for their children.. But many MPs emerged from the meeting seeking stronger assurances that the Secretary of State is not ready to bow too much to the bosses.Gerry Sutcliffe, Labour MP for Bradford South and chairman of the group, said the Commons motion which he will be tabling with senior backbench colleagues would welcome the Fairness at Work legislation but would urge the Cabinet to adhere to the principles in the White Paper on trade union recognition.The MPs left the meeting with the firm view that many details of the legislation remain to be settled, and a Cabinet battle could be about to begin. "There is going to be a row over this."The rumblings of backbench discontent emerged after Mr Mandelson sought to reassure the MPs that the principles underpinning the White Paper on trade union recognition were being protected.

They want its terms of reference to be tightly limited by the Bill."There is a lot of concern about the flexibility which Mr Mandelson is proposing," said a senior member of the Labour backbench group.More than 70 MPs attended a meeting of Labour's backbench trade union committee to hear John Monks, the general secretary of the TUC, express his concern at the compromise being worked out by Mr Mandelson over the fair employment legislation."John Monks was given a good reception, but Peter Mandelson was not," said one senior Labour backbencher. But the MPs are unhappy that the Central Arbitration Committee will be given wide powers under Mr Mandelson's Bill to assess claims for automatic bargaining rights. A Cabinet committee is expected this week to agree the final detail of the controversial Fairness at Work Bill included in the Queen's Speech. Mr Mandelson has gone a long way to meeting the demands of unions against the wishes of employers' organisations, but officers of the backbench trade union committee of Labour MPs who met Mr Mandelson last week are planning to table a Commons motion seeking further concessions.Unions will be expected to meet a 50 per cent threshold in ballots before demanding recognition by employers and Mr Mandelson has dropped a proposal requiring those taking part in ballots to have been members of unions for at least three months. A SHOT will be fired across Peter Mandelson's bows this week by Labour MPs who fear the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry may further weaken the Government's commitment to giving trade unions the right to negotiate for their members. MINISTERS HAVE turned down a deal with the United States government over custody cases because of fears that Hollywood wives would be able to appear on legal aid in British courts. The minister for the Lord Chancellor's office, Geoff Hoon, was tempted to go along with the deal, because it would have helped dozens of British families in "tug-of-love" cases in the US. The sticking-point was a demand that, in return for making it easier for Britons to seek custody for their children in US courts, US citizens should be entitled to easier access to justice in the British courts, including legal aid.The Government is limiting its availability but the US request raised the prospect of Hollywood wives with British connections using legal aid to sort out their arguments over divorce in this country."He thought long and hard about it before saying no, but in the end he had to turn it down," said a Whitehall source.The decision to turn down the US offer will disappoint British families engaged in drawn-out custody battles for their children through the American courts.They face daunting difficulties in going ahead with legal action in the US courts in the federal system, where state courts have responsibility for family law.The US government, in private talks with the Lord Chancellor's office, offered to simplify the system by allowing Britons to seek justice through federal courts instead of negotiating through a maze of lower courts, which can prove expensive.The cases have included that of Sheehan and Conar Sidwell, who were snatched by their father and taken to America via London and Germany.Their mother, Kim, tracked them to Orlando and brought them home after a legal battle but was left with a pounds 6,000 bill.Scrapping routine checks on passports of UK citizens leaving Britain has been blamed for a 58 per cent increase in parental abductions of children from this country to live abroad since 1995.. The LCC had paid the price for failing to oppose the party machine's "centralising tendencies"..

Paul Thompson, a professor at Edinburgh University and editor of the LCC journal Renewal, which is continuing, said the success of hard-left candidates in this year's ballot of party members for the National Executive was "really depressing". Tony Blair is the most overtly modernising leader Labour has ever had and his government has set about the most radical constitutional change for a century Labour is now more representative of its members and voters. Trotskyism has been reduced to a tiny and ineffective rump within the party."There were some doubts expressed. Even Ms Booth, in a discreet assertion of her right to a political mind of her own, sent word that she was sorry she could not be there.Mr Lucas, now director of the New Labour lobbying company Lucas Lawson Mendelsohn, listed the group's achievements: "The LCC has run its course. The roll-call of apologies for absence at Saturday's meeting was like an archaeological dig through the layers of left-wing Labour factions over the past two decades: Barbara Castle, sacked from Jim Callaghan's Cabinet in 1976; Michael Meacher, a Bennite minister in the last Labour government and now Environment minister; Peter Hain, then a radical Bennite activist, now a Welsh Office minister. Under John Smith it campaigned to end the trade union block vote and bring in the one-member, one-vote system for choosing MPs.But now it has fulfilled most of its aims and most of its leading members are in positions of power in government and industry and as lobbyists.

"We have achieved most of the tasks we set for ourselves," declared the chair, Ben Lucas. It was set up in 1978 to bring together all the left-wing forces in the party and promote Tony Benn's leadership ambitions. But its priority quickly became the fight against Trotskyist infiltrators and, by the time Mr Blair was persuaded to join in 1982, it was organising the "soft left" - a sort of Third Way between hardline socialists and Social Democratic Party defectors. After the 1983 election, which brought Mr Blair into parliament, his wife, Cherie Booth, served for three years on the LCC executive as the organisation played an important role supporting Neil Kinnock's drive for party reform. Meeting in a smoke-free room above a pub in Pimlico on Saturday, the remaining active members of the LCC decided to close the group down. Following the election of the group's most famous member, Tony Blair, as Prime Minister last year, the Labour Co-ordinating Committee has decided to declare victory in its 20-year battle to modernise the party.