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.
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