You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after winning a giant mandate from the electorate and having not yet done anything to wick off the people who don’t already hate him, our new Prime Minister might like to bask in a few weeks of good vibes. Things, after all, can only get worse from here. Wouldn’t it be nice to feel like Mister Popular for a bit?
The original ban on smoking indoors was illiberal, but it was illiberal to a very legible purpose
Sir Keir Starmer, it seems, has a stronger character than would to succumb to that temptation. Already, even his own cabinet ministers are briefing that they think he’s laying the gloom on a bit thick, and that as the Prime Minister voted in on (presumably) a brief to improve everyone’s miserable lot, it would do for him to offer a bit of good cheer and optimism.
Well. The calculation he is making is, I suppose, as follows. Voters have short memories. If you’re going to have to do something unpopular, such as raise taxes, cut health budgets, cave in to the unions, or freeze pensioners into popsicles, the best time to do it was a month ago and the second best time to do it is right now. You must spend your political capital while you have it. You won’t like the headlines, the sky will grow dark with incoming tomatoes, and your proverbial honeymoon period will be of the sort that involves slammed doors, hastily packed suitcases, and a two-weeks-early return flight to drizzly Luton.
But, you reason, by the time you’re seeking re-election those headlines will be forgotten and – with a bit of luck – the medicine will have started to work: the country will be feeling the benefits of all the things that those unpopular measures will have been intended to fix. Reculer pour mieux sauter. And, of course, you can pique yourself on making tough decisions, treating the public like grown-ups, and so forth.
So – just like Chancellor Rachel Reeves with her theatrical mortification at the ‘black hole’ in the outgoing government’s books – Starmer’s rolling the pitch like billy-oh now. We can certainly take a range of positions on whether all these unpopular measures are necessary; and we can even speculate on whether Sir Keir sincerely believes they are necessary, or whether he’s simply making excuses to do what he has always wanted to do, viz hoover as much money as he can out of the private sector and wallop the hated bourgeoisie. (That he looks to be planning a tax grab without a corresponding spending splurge gives the lie, at least, to the most extreme caricature of him as a doctrinaire Marxist loon.)
Still, the proof of that particular pudding will be in the eating. What seems incomprehensible to me is this smoking thing. It’s a fight he didn’t need to pick, and it looks an awful lot like an unforced error. There isn’t a great constituency of people out there who have been passionately campaigning for it to be illegal to stand outside a pub having a fag. The status quo was relatively uncontroversial. And feelings about it, such as they were, won’t have segmented along particular political lines.
The original ban on smoking indoors was illiberal – I remember arguing back then that it seemed outrageous no exceptions would be made for venues where adults consented to be exposed to second-hand smoke – but it was illiberal to a very legible purpose. Principled objections having been overcome and/or ignored, it achieved that purpose. The nation got a bit healthier, and everybody found they got pleasantly used to not stinking of ashtrays after a night on the town.
But banning smoking in public parks, outdoor restaurants, pub gardens and – in some versions of the plan that have been floated – outside the doorways of hospitals, pubs or restaurants is illiberal to no very clear purpose. It is likely to put a substantial dent in the hospitality industry if every smoker gives up going to the pub altogether. It will put an even bigger dent in the tax revenues Sir Keir is so keen on if every smoker gives up smoking altogether (smokers don’t appear to be so much a burden on the state as one of its most heroic and self-sacrificing benefactors).
It’s also more likely to inconvenience non-smokers than otherwise: in whichever small section of the King’s highway it’s now deemed legal to smoke, you’ll find great huddles of our ashy brethren cluttering up the joint; and where the demarcations aren’t wholly clear we’ll see a national Eisteddfod of tutting and scolding. And if, as the final logic of this move seems to suggest, determined smokers will eventually only be able to indulge their filthy habits in their own homes with all the windows closed, will nobody think of their pink-lunged children?
It is a stick with which the libertarian right will be able to beat him, and the wallops of that stick will be applauded by very many people you might naturally expect to be a bit more in his corner. Smokers may be a guilty minority, but they are a minority of all political views and none, and they will tend to feel by know that they have been harried and shamed and inconvenienced enough for their choices over the last thirty years. My colleague Michael Heath’s early 1990s cartoon The Outlaw, about the tribulations of the last man in England to smoke, is looking more and more prophetic.
It’s well for Sir Keir to be able, as mentioned, to shrug off the idea that he’s an economically illiterate state socialist. But it does him no good at all to go out of his way to give the impression of being a finger-wagging bossy-boots.
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