It’s a curious political world. Few who voted Labour last month actually wanted Labour policies, or for that matter had more than the haziest idea what they were. Now the Labour leadership is returning the compliment. It is increasingly obvious that it has neither much idea what electors want, nor any great desire to provide them with it. Withdrawing the winter fuel allowance, going hell-bent for net zero (whatever the consequences), clamping down on our rights online, the list goes on. The government’s proposed extension of the smoking ban, leaked yesterday, is a further case in point.
Most British people have strong views about liberty and minding one’s own business
The plan, apparently hatched in collusion with Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, looks at introducing a smoking ban in many public spaces: pub and club gardens, restaurant terraces, playgrounds, sports grounds, streets outside hospitals, nightclubs, schools and universities. It graciously accepts that we should continue to be allowed to smoke in homes, streets and wide-open spaces, but not in many other places.
While an indoor smoking ban could, just plausibly, be justified as stopping people from causing direct harm to others, banning smoking in gardens is just authoritarian. Proscribing it in the street outside hospitals and university campuses goes even further: it amounts essentially to mandated virtue-signalling – a legal ban on the public display of activities that the government disapproves of. Britain is now on the road to prohibition. Layla McCay of the NHS Confederation, the trade body of NHS bureaucrats, said on BBC Radio 4 that the latest plan is to be welcomed as part of the move towards abolishing smoking.
But there is a limit to how much even a newly-elected administration can discount the views of the ordinary people that voted for it. Keir Starmer has managed in less than two months to drop into seriously negative approval ratings. According to YouGov, more than half of the country now disapprove of his government. And this poll was taken before the smoking ban plans were leaked – there’s good reason to believe ordinary people will dislike Starmer more when they hear about them.
For one, unlike the middle-class technocrats who largely populate the Labour benches, most British people, especially those in the just-about-managing class, have strong views about liberty and minding one’s own business, and objections to being ordered not to do something when it causes no obvious harm to anyone else. The idea that you should not be allowed to light up after a pub meal in the garden is likely to inspire a feeling that officials are meddling in something that is none of their business.
It is becoming clear that members of this government have no particular interest in individual liberty. Their approach to smoking is to see it not as a political issue but as a matter of project management. The project is to improve health, and to do this smoking must be abolished. The Department of Health, having said it did not comment on leaks, then proceeded to do exactly that, saying that smoking killed thousands a year and that it wanted to ‘finally make Britain smoke-free.’ Arguments about freedom, or what is or is not the business of the state, clearly bore ministers. They are seen as little more than aspects of some passé culture war, which the new, grown-up Labour administration has now happily left behind it.
The second reason this ban will anger ordinary people is that it involves an awkward element of class. Few of the middle class now smoke: smoking is concentrated among those who do trade and manual jobs, the unemployed. Working-class people do not want to be patronised by middle-class MPs. Once, Labour MPs with direct links to working-class life would have been immediately aware of this. No longer. The Labour party, in Parliament and outside it, has for some time been a middle-class caucus. Labour has won five years in power, but it needs to be reminded that people who voted for it are quite capable of pressuring MPs, protesting, voting against the party in local elections. Keir Starmer is not as invulnerable as he might think.
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