UK Tobacco Ban: The Tory Tobacco Ban

Britain’s Conservative members of Parliament (or most of them, anyway) have long since given up making much of an effort to pretend that they have much interest in preserving individual liberty against the encroachments of the state. Even so, it was depressing that most of them supported the strikingly illiberal anti-smoking legislation put forward by Britain’s current (and, possibly, last) Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak.

Sunak, like his predecessor-but-one, Theresa May, is, above all, a technocrat. He knows that his time in office is drawing to a close (Britain will be holding an election later this year in which the Tories will be crushed) and, like May, another miserable failure, wants to leave a “legacy” on his way out. May’s was to ensure that Britain became the first major country to legally bind itself to reaching net-zero greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 2050, a legacy for which she deserves to be reviled for a very long time.

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Andrew Stuttaford

Andrew Stuttaford is the editor of National Review's Capital Matters.

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Britain’s Conservative members of Parliament (or most of them, anyway) have long since given up making much of an effort to pretend that they have much interest in preserving individual liberty against the encroachments of the state. Even so, it was depressing that most of them supported the strikingly illiberal anti-smoking legislation put forward by Britain’s current (and, possibly, last) Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak.

Sunak, like his predecessor-but-one, Theresa May, is, above all, a technocrat. He knows that his time in office is drawing to a close (Britain will be holding an election later this year in which the Tories will be crushed) and, like May, another miserable failure, wants to leave a “legacy” on his way out. May’s was to ensure that Britain became the first major country to legally bind itself to reaching net-zero greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 2050, a legacy for which she deserves to be reviled for a very long time.