Just about the only justification for Britain’s hopeless Conservative Party is that it is somewhat less appalling than the Labour Party. But there are days when that “somewhat” has to do a lot of work. Today is yet another of them.
The Tories’ technocratic prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has decided that he would like the state to intervene yet more in adults’ consumer choices. It was confirmed today that the government plans to introduce legislation under which the minimum age at which someone can buy a cigarette will increase by a year each year. This means that someone who is 14 today will never (legally) be able to buy a cigarette. It’s an idea that the Tories have taken from the New Zealand government then led by Jacinda Ardern. If anyone had any doubt that the Conservative Party (at least in parliament), long a handmaiden to the nanny state, has shifted to the center-left, the decision of its leader to look to Ardern for inspiration should probably seal it.
The matter will be decided by a “free vote” in Parliament, but, given the irredeemably bossy nature of Britain’s establishment and the support of the Labour Party, it is certain to pass. Adding a little extra stupidity to his policy, Sunak is considering steps to make vaping — a far, far safer alternative to cigarettes — more expensive, a reminder that this policy is primarily about control, not health. The creeping cigarette ban will only apply to England, but the rest of the U.K. can be expected to follow suit.
Sunak has come up with a few numbers to justify this move. Smoking costs the National Health Service £2.4 billion, apparently. Horrors! However, the British government received over £10 billion from tobacco taxes in its most recent financial year. Awkward. Smoking-related diseases allegedly add another £1 billion or so to the social-care bill. That’s still not enough, so it’s now being claimed that “over £13 billion is lost in productivity costs from tobacco-related lost earnings, unemployment and premature death.” Ignoring the fact that that number looks very much like it was cobbled together from who knows what, there is something deeply distasteful about the fact that Sunak apparently seems to think of Brits as nothing more than cogs in the economic machine. Their freedom to decide whether to smoke or not has little value, apparently.
Out of curiosity, I checked to see what the Conservative Party’s Covid lockdown is thought to have cost. In its first year alone, the hit to the economy was, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, £251 billion.
Oh.
Last month the BBC’s health correspondent looked at Sunak’s plan. The BBC is generally unpromising territory for this sort of thing, but there were a few nuggets:
How can an arbitrary line be drawn, making something illegal just because a person was born in a different year? Surely an illicit trade in cigarettes will ensue?
It will.
And then there is this:
We will have a situation in 20 years’ time where a couple aged 34 and 35 could be living together and one can buy cigarettes and one cannot.
And then there is this:
And while health experts are pleased with the announcement on smoking, there is real frustration about the approach taken to obesity, which is estimated to cost the NHS twice the £3bn a year spent dealing with the ill-health caused by smoking.
That is why some research has suggested obesity is now an even bigger threat to the health of the nation than smoking — while smoking rates have declined four-fold since the 1970s, obesity rates have gone in the opposite direction.
Now there’s a mystery.
Of course, the food police have been closing in on the nation’s dinner tables. In 2016, the Conservatives’ sugar tax was introduced on soft drinks, and, under Boris Johnson (now, with characteristic hypocrisy, opposing Sunak’s cigarette ban) the Tories toyed with other measures, including tighter restrictions on advertising and promotions for junk food. That will leave the party poorly placed to object when the next (late 2024/early 2025) Labour government is in power.
Nanny’s ratchet turns.