Save our cigars!

There’s nothing new about Rishi Sunak’s reported proposals to phase out smoking in Britain. His plan has been borrowed from New Zealand’s former leader Jacinda Ardern, whose shamefully illiberal legacy includes the complete illegalisation of tobacco sales to those born after 1 January 2009.   

There’s nothing progressive about it, either. The Anglosphere’s elite war on tobacco is at least 400 years old. It can be traced back to James I in 1604, and his A Counterblaste to Tobacco, a sanctimonious treatise in which he denounced the new-world leaf ‘blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.’

A similar spirit informed New Labour’s 2006 Health act, which shoved pub smokers out on to the pavement to smoke like wretched dogs, instead of letting establishments choose whether or not to go smoke-free. Since then, tobacco tax hikes have hit us every year. 

Leaving aside the obvious scandal that a Conservative prime minister now seems incapable of defending basic ideas of freedom, it’s also worth pointing out that the government’s anti-tobacco narrative is based on lies. The first lie is that smoking is a burden on the NHS. What a nonsense. Yes, smoking related illnesses cost the NHS £2.6 billion a year, but tobacco tax revenue is predicted to hit £10.6 billion in 2023. It is in, in financial terms, in the interest of the NHS to keep Brits burning sticks – because it is in the interest of the British tax system.

Tobacco tax revenue represents 1 per cent of all receipts and is equivalent to 0.4 per cent of national income. Not only will the Treasury balance sheets have to find a way to replace that diminishing return after the ban comes into place, the cost of trying to police the inevitable black market will cost millions more.

The proposed ban is on ‘tobacco’, which would include cigars. Cigarettes are revolting and, everyone can now agree, bad for you. Vaping is a moral abomination. But cigars… well, cigars are another story. Studies have found that smoking one cigar a day has no impact on mortality. And that’s before we consider Sir Winston Churchill. My namesake smoked between 8 and 10 cigars a day and lived till the mighty age of 90.

Churchill put his name to one of the most popular cigar shapes, boosting worldwide sales. In the 1880s British financier Leopold de Rothschild commissioned a shorter cigar, a shape that still carries his name. And to this day there are hundreds of independent cigar business in Britain.

Take, for example, Trident Military Cigars: founded by veterans in 2021, whose original blends and delicious draw can be enjoyed in the knowledge that some of the cost is donated to the brave men who have served our great country.

There is 1573 Cigars, established in 2023, the exclusive wholesaler of Foundation Cigars, known in the business as ‘the Joe Rogan cigar’, and to connoisseurs as the best sticks outside of Cuba, (and Cigar Snob’s ‘cigar of the year 2022’ to prove it). I ought to confess that I co-founded ‘1573’, and though I have an agenda in keeping tobacco legal, we are a mission-driven enterprise – that mission is that all Britons may enjoy the finest of manly treats.

So mitts off our sticks, Rishi, you petty tyrant. Tobacco is as English as breakfast tea. It was packed into British pipes before the Tory party even existed, and will be rolled, chewed, puffed and sniffed here long after your party is ash in the wind.