A Nanny Stater after All: Sunak’s Proposed Cigarette Ban

Was it only a few days ago when Britain’s Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak signaled that he really might be on the right after all, by (marginally) scaling back Britain’s disastrous net-zero commitments. Well, forget that. He has now announced that he would like to see the introduction of a creeping smoking ban, modeled on the one introduced by failed New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, a classic authoritarian of the center-left. That the Tories are now copying a policy introduced by Ardern is a measure of how far a party that once believed (or pretended to believe) in individual responsibility and adults making these sorts of decision for themselves has declined.

Reuters:

Britain’s government on Wednesday proposed banning younger generations from ever buying cigarettes, a move that would give the country some of the world’s toughest smoking rules and hurt the sales of major tobacco firms.

If passed into law, the smoking age would rise by one year every year, potentially phasing out smoking among young people almost completely as soon as 2040, a briefing paper said.

“A 14-year-old today will never legally be sold a cigarette,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told the Conservative Party conference, where he announced the plan.

Sunak’s choice of words is subtly (and tellingly) misleading, framed to half-suggest to anyone not concentrating that 14-year-olds could buy cigarettes today. The minimum age for someone to buy cigarettes in the U.K. is currently 18. What the proposed law would mean is that someone who is 14 today could not buy a cigarette at 24, 64, or even 84.

I’m old enough to remember being told that claims that earlier moves against tobacco would lead to prohibition were nonsense, paranoia, etc.

Reuters:

The tobacco industry criticised the proposals. The Tobacco Manufacturers Association said they were a “disproportionate attack” on adults’ rights and would fuel black market trade.

“The prohibition of legal products always has dangerous side effects and opens the door to criminal gangs to sell illegal products,” it said.

Quite. Conservatives are supposed to know something about history. Sunak, it can only be assumed, does not.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Annabel Denham lets rip:

Much as Akshata Murty may have endeared and persuaded delegates in Manchester of her husband’s commitment to Conservative values, there isn’t a shred of Conservatism in this policy. No personal autonomy; the idea that people will make trade-offs — and sometimes choose the unhealthy option, such is the wonder of the human condition. Though more often than not nowadays, when it comes to tobacco, they don’t: the proportion of smokers has fallen significantly in recent decades: from half of adults in the early 1970s to just 14 per cent now.

There was seemingly no consideration of the unintended consequences — the black market that this policy will buttress and the corresponding reduction in tax revenues. And, as usual, the nannying measure is being cloaked in the language of public health and justified on the grounds that it will help protect our socialist, creaking healthcare system.

Here are the facts, for MPs who may soon have to decide whether to wave through this awful policy. Smokers don’t cost the NHS money, they save it. A 2017 study from the Institute of Economic Affairs estimated a net saving of £14.7 billion per annum at the rates of consumption at the time, with the costs smokers incurred significantly outweighed by the sum of tobacco duty paid and the old-age expenditures avoided due to premature mortality.

You can see the study here.

Denham:

This policy would limit consumer choice and create a two-tier society, one in which 48 year old John could purchase cigarettes while Jane, his 47 year old wife, would need to procure them in the underground economy. Shopkeepers would be required to decide on the spot whether a customer might have been born in 2004 or 2005.

As for Sunak’s claim that this is protecting young people, that perennial cry of modern authoritarian looking for something to ban, a large majority of the young already do not.

The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson:

If it’s not necessary to ban then it’s necessary not to ban: that would be the Burkean, conservative way. So this sits ill with the rest of the Sunak agenda and ‘good conservative common sense’ he was defending earlier on in his speech. I suspect it was inspired more by Wes Streeting saying that a Labour government might do this. Is this shooting your opponent’s fox, or adopting their agenda? Before this speech, I’d have said that Sunak is a liberal. I’m not quite so sure that I’d say that now.

I never thought that there was much chance that Sunak was a (classical) liberal. He would not have risen so far in a center-left party if he were. But what we know now for sure is that not only is he not a liberal, but that his instincts are both profoundly and pettily authoritarian. And we can see that he is not afraid to display them. Anyone hoping that Sunak will roll back Britain’s overbearing, intrusive state will have to look elsewhere. And as for any hopes that he will do much to tackle net zero, a policy that, in its current form, is about control, not climate, forget it.

The Telegraph’s Denham asks:

What is the enduring appeal of these paternalistic, petty regulations? They allow politicians to be seen to do something without spending money. As budgetary constraints have tightened while welfare, pensions and NHS spending have ballooned, elected representatives have pulled this lever with ever greater enthusiasm. But they do come at a cost. To businesses, consumers, workers in the form of lower wages. And pretty soon they’ll cost the Tories.

All true, but there’s something else at play too. In their hearts and their heads, politicians such as Sunak think they know better than the poor saps they expect to vote for them, simpletons they consider so dimwitted that they cannot, for example, be trusted to choose for themselves whether to have a smoke. Even, one day, at the age of 64.