Anyone surprised by leaked documents showing smoking may soon be banned in beer gardens, small parks, outdoor restaurants, open-air spaces at nightclubs and outside football stadiums hasn’t been paying attention.
For a start, the UK has been on the slippery slope towards tobacco prohibition for nearly two decades: Tony Blair banned smoking outdoors, Theresa May set a target of going ‘smoke-free’ by 2030. Rishi Sunak – a man whose opposition to some of the tougher lockdown measures gave a glimmer of hope that liberalism hadn’t been entirely extinguished in the Tory party – attempted to make a generational ban on tobacco sales his legacy.
All of this is a death by a thousand cuts, our freedom slightly curtailed with every stroke. It’s also yet another blow to a pub industry which, as well as being part of this country’s social fabric, supports 885,000 jobs across the UK and contributes £23 billion to GDP. A 2020 government press release suggested banning smoking outdoors would lead many hospitality venues to close and lead to job cuts.
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill was put on ice when Rishi Sunak pulled off the political masterstroke of holding an election when his MPs were least expecting it. It was inevitable that Labour would revive it, but these new proposals would significantly toughen it up.
Yet no one has paused to ask whether the legislation is necessary at all: smoking rates in the UK peaked at around 60 per cent in the 1950s, falling to around 13 per cent now. Has Labour really thought through the unintended consequences of a ban? Do they realise that it will only strengthen the black market for tobacco – and cost the state more in lost tax revenues?
Though the NHS zealots will argue the measure will ‘save’ billions, smokers don’t cost the healthcare service, they save it money. The economic literature strongly indicates that smokers use less healthcare because their lifetimes are shorter. They also take less out of their pensions.
We know that prohibition doesn’t work. As South Africa and India have shown, it only hands money and power to criminal gangs. It didn’t go well in 1920s America or Bhutan in 2004. The economist Christopher Snowdon has pointed out that the ban of e-cigarettes in Australia led to people buying on the extensive black market where unregulated devices are widely available.
Still, there is a more principled objection to these proposals. Regulation of tobacco in Britain has always been underpinned by the assumption that informed adult consumers have the right to smoke: that they should be free to make their own decisions about what goes in their bodies, even if they choose things that are bad for them.
We’re now shifting towards a position where the government needs to protect us from ourselves, even when the decisions we make have no effect on others.
This is perhaps exactly what we should expect from a Labour government run by a self-proclaimed socialist, whose authoritarian instincts were made clear during the recent riots.
But this ought to be anathema to the Conservatives. So where is the opposition? Where are the Tories making the case that these policies trash the notion of personal autonomy? Unfortunately, they’re in a tight spot, given fewer than 60 voted against the Tobacco Bill, and a number of these rebels are recently out of a job. Boris Johnson, who once argued it was the inalienable right of an Englishman to gorge on confectionery, advanced a raft of ‘anti-obesity’ measures that would ban daytime advertising on junk food when he was in power. His predecessor brought in food reformulation schemes and a sugar tax.
If the politicians won’t protest, what about the public? Thanks to lockdowns we have become so inured to being told what to do, and so comfortable with casting judgment on others’ behaviour, that a YouGov poll last year found some 71 per cent support the gradual smoking ban, with just 17 per cent opposed.
The rational approach would be to allow pubs and bars that want to let people smoke in gardens continue to do so, while alerting would-be customers with a sign on the door. That way, people can vote with their feet. The risk would be entirely avoidable.
But this is Starmer’s Britain. And with Labour severely constrained by tight public finances, the Prime Minister is clearly seeking to expand the state’s reach with more regulations, bans and laws. The public health establishment, emboldened by our steady slide into illiberalism, will keep pushing for more restrictions – perhaps on alcohol, or so-called junk food, or meat. Let’s not forget that the food watchdog chair Susan Jebb recently suggested a ban on bringing cake into the office.
We are now a global outlier on smoking, after New Zealand scrapped its generational ban. If only our leaders would see reason and scrap the smoking ban as well.
Listen to more on Coffee House Shots, The Spectator’s daily politics podcast:
Comments