It’s going to be a long day for Rishi Sunak. It’s the second reading of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill and the Prime Minister is expecting to see a number of his own politicians vote against his smoking ban this evening. Opponents of the bill include Sir Simon Clarke and Sir John Hayes while Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch are understood to be considering voting against Sunak’s proposal. And now former PM and passionate libertarian Liz Truss has made her intervention in the Chamber.
Blasting the government for trying to make the decisions of adults for them with its ‘virtue-signalling piece of legislation’, Truss voiced her concerns that the smoking ban proposals were ‘emblematic of a technocratic establishment in this country that wants to limit people’s freedom’. She slammed the freedom-quashing ‘agenda’ of the ‘health police’ in the Chamber, before turning directly on the Labour party.
Truss lambasted Starmer’s MPs for filibustering about ferrets some weeks ago to, she says, stop her private member’s bill on banning puberty blockers from being heard. Why ban cigarettes and not puberty blockers, Truss quizzed her opponents, before lamenting that ‘too many members of parliament have gone along with this orthodoxy’.
Then the former PM turned her attention back to her own benches. ‘Disappointed’ that a Conservative government is moving forward with the smoking ban, Truss concluded with a message for her colleagues:
If people want to vote for finger-wagging, nagging control freaks, there are plenty of them to choose from on the benches opposite — and that’s the way they will vote. And if people want to have control over their lives, if they want to have freedom, that is why they vote Conservative.
Watch the full clip here:
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