The war against tobacco is, these days, more about control than health.
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.
Sunak’s chosen legacy will be less economically destructive but is, in some ways, more insulting. It says a great deal about him that his legacy is a borrowed (and failed) idea and that it was borrowed from the appalling Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s former prime minister. A similar law was passed during her government. It has since been repealed.
Sunak’s big idea is a law forever banning the sale in England of tobacco products to anyone born after January 1, 2009. This will be achieved by increasing the legal minimum age (currently 18) for buying such products by one year each year from 2027. Fast forward to 2040 and people born in 2009, who will be in their early 30s by then, will still not be able to buy a cigarette. They will have to ask someone born in 2008 or before to do it for them.
The law, which will only apply in England (but is bound to be copied in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) has now easily passed its first hurdle in Parliament. In a nod to the Tories’ more liberal past, Conservative MPs were given a free vote, and by a narrow majority gave it their support; 57 voted against, 178 voted in favor, and 106 “heroes” abstained. The more unabashedly authoritarian Labour Party supported the bill. Now it will make it through the parliamentary machinery, and is likely to be law before the Tories are replaced in government by Labour, a party which is — no small achievement — even worse.
Writing for the Critic, Christopher Snowdon, a smoker-turned-vaper, swiftly stubs out the prohibitionists’ attempt at a case. Their logic was, he explained, that
smoking is so addictive that it restricts freedom. They claim that smokers do not actually want to smoke, but were foolish enough to get hooked in childhood and are now unable to quit. And so, despite the evidence of your eyes and ears, it is the people who keep banning things who are standing up for freedom while libertarians support enslavement.
Orwellian much?
As Snowdon points out, according to England’s Office for National Statistics, 69 percent of people in England who have ever smoked have since given it up, despite, supposedly, being unable to. The other claim being made by “freedom-loving prohibitionists,” that current smokers are desperate to give it up, is “equally dubious”:
In the latest ONS survey, only 44.5 per cent said they intended to quit. When asked if they REALLY want to quit (the capital letters are in the survey question), this falls to 20 per cent – and even among this minority, most of them have no intention of quitting in the next three months. And when asked why they want to quit, the second most common answer (after “to improve my physical health”) is “to save money”. Since taxes make up around 85 per cent of the price of cigarettes, this is a rational response to government extortion rather than an admission that they hate smoking.
The most effective way of encouraging Britain’s remaining smokers to give up their pastime is to offer them alternative (and much safer) ways of taking nicotine (by itself a relatively harmless substance) such as vaping. The British government is, however, making those less, rather than more, accessible, another reminder that the war against tobacco is, these days, more about control than health.
One problem for prohibitionists is that by extending this ban to adults, they can no longer plead that they are doing what they do “for the children.” Sunak and his accomplices attempt to get around this by portraying adult smokers, in Snowdon’s words,
as helpless as children, desperate to be led to safety by wiser souls who know their true desires. Politicians and “public health” campaigners now believe that they can dismiss the revealed preferences of millions of people because they have a window into what Adam Smith called “the man within”. Thanks to this unique insight into our inner beings, they know that what we really want to do is the opposite of what we are actually doing and that our true preferences are remarkably similar to the preferences of Rishi Sunak and Chris Whitty [England’s chief medical officer].
Once this premise is accepted, there is no limit to what the government can do “help” us realise our true selves and make us truly “free”, as Isaiah Berlin pointed out 55 years ago in Two Concepts of Liberty.
Please click on the link to what Berlin had to say. He sets out where such thinking can lead. That a Conservative government can indulge in such logic is to give permission to its likely Labour successor to go much further. That Sunak appears not to understand this shows that, in addition to his other all too evident failings as prime minister, he suffers from a colossal lack of political imagination.
There is widespread speculation that, when he is turfed out of office, Sunak, a graduate of Oxford and Stanford who worked for a while in a hedge fund in Santa Monica, will, like Prince Harry, move to Gavin Newsom’s California, where his wife still has an apartment. He will fit right in.