So Thérèse Coffey, the health secretary, is putting the tobacco control plan on ice. Or is she? As in many other areas of public policy these days, all we have are rumours. Someone may be flying a kite with this rumour, but it is not clear whether it is the health secretary or a disgruntled civil servant at the Department of Health holding the string. All Coffey has said officially is that she was not ‘aware’ of what’s going on with it.
You may not be aware of it at all and I can hardly blame you. In the dying days of Theresa May’s administration – two prime ministers ago – a green paper declared that England would be ‘smoke-free’ by 2030 (‘smoke-free’ is counter-intuitively defined as a smoking rate below five per cent). It was May’s attempt to leave some sort of legacy from her dismal premiership. As with Net Zero, she didn’t need to worry about how, or if, it would happen.
The target was put in place without a vote in Parliament and without many people noticing, least of all – I suspect – smokers themselves. All eyes were on Brexit, and then on Covid-19, and then on inflation. Hassling smokers has not been a priority for the general public.
His bizarre recommendations included painting cigarettes green or brown
Rightly so. A pack of cigarettes costs £13, you can’t smoke them anywhere except outdoors and in private dwellings, they haven’t been advertised for 20 years, they are hidden behind shutters in shops and have been in beige packaging with gruesome photographs since 2017.
Everyone has got the message that smoking is bad for you and the government would rather you didn’t do it. Having exhausted every sensible idea to deter people from smoking – and several half-mad ones – we have surely reached the point at which the individual’s right to choose is respected. My body, my choice, as they say.
What is the argument for turning the screw on this beleaguered minority yet again? In a paternalistic editorial, the Times acknowledges there is ‘a balance to strike between individual freedom and public health’ but that ‘smoking reduction has long moved beyond this binary tension’ because there is ‘common consent that reducing smoking is the right thing to do’. In other words, the freedom of individuals no long matters once the rest of society disapproves of them. This is what John Stuart Mill meant when he talked about the tyranny of the majority. If your mind is clouded by a dislike of tobacco smoke, try substituting ’free speech’ or ‘religious freedom’ to see what an ugly and dangerous sentiment this is.
No one who takes up smoking today can claim to have been lured in by the tobacco industry, since manufacturers have not had even the subtlest forms of marketing available to it for years. Addiction is the excuse some anti-smoking campaigners use for going after long-time smokers, but there are now so many low-risk nicotine products available that we might assume that those who opt for cigarettes genuinely prefer them.
There is a problem with consumer ignorance insofar as some smokers wrongly believe that vaping is as bad as smoking. There is also a problem in that many smokers are not aware of the existence of nicotine pouches and heated tobacco products. A government ‘smoke-free plan’ could usefully address these issues by relaxing regulations on low-risk products and educating the public about the relative risks, but that doesn’t seem to be what the anti-smoking lobby has in mind.
Earlier this year, the government asked Dr Javed Khan, the former CEO of Barnado’s, to come up with some anti-smoking policies. His bizarre recommendations included painting cigarettes green or brown, raising the age at which tobacco can be purchased by one year every year ‘until no one can buy a tobacco product’, banning smoking in more places outdoors, putting health warnings on individual cigarettes and banning the depiction of tobacco use on television before 9pm.
This would take the ‘tax and ban’ approach to tobacco to ludicrous extremes. It would make a mockery of Liz Truss’s promise, in her speech at the Conservative party conference, that she is not going to tell us how to live our lives. If green cigarettes and incremental prohibition are part of the plan, she has little choice but to shelve it.
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