Christopher Snowdon is Head of Lifestyle Economics at the IEA.
Kemi Badenoch has described the generational tobacco ban as the least conservative policy of the last Conservative government. In both ideological and party-political terms, she is surely correct.
Rishi Sunak borrowed it from Wes Streeting of the Labour Party who had borrowed it from Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party in New Zealand. When a conservative coalition replaced Ardern’s government last year, the generational ban was repealed.
Britain is now the only country in the world that is still taking the bizarre idea of banning people born after 2008 from ever buying tobacco products seriously.
Sunak’s adoption of the policy may have been a sop to Chris Whitty and an attempt to build a legacy, but we can expect the Labour government to pursue it with genuine zeal.
Streeting and Starmer seem to sincerely believe that the NHS will go ‘bankrupt’ if the public do not sit up straight, eat their greens and give up their bad habits. This is nonsense. The NHS cannot be bankrupted and it is the people who live the longest who cost the state the most money. Nevertheless, they believe it and they could not resist adding a few bells and whistles to Sunak’s draft of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, with new restrictions on where people can smoke and vape, a ban on e-cigarette advertising and a range of new powers that the Health Secretary may or may not use in the future.
From a free market perspective, almost everything about the Tobacco and Vapes Bill is objectionable.
I am well aware that the Conservative Party is not full of classical liberals and I am sure there will be comments posted below this article from authoritarian right-wingers who support Labour on this issue, but you don’t have to be a libertarian to have serious concerns about this legislation. Alongside eye-watering tobacco taxes and a new e-cigarette tax that will double the cost of vaping, this package of measures will push both products into the hands of the black market.
In Australia, where cigarette taxes are even higher and e-cigarettes are banned outright, tobacconists are being firebombed every few days as criminal gangs fight the ‘tobacco turf wars’. In Britain, legal cigarette sales are falling much faster than the smoking rate – a sure sign that the illicit market is growing. Smokers have little reason to feel guilty about avoiding paying taxes to a government that so obviously holds them in contempt. Underage vapers – the putative target of Labour’s new laws – are already buying e-cigarettes illegally. It makes no difference to these people how the state taxes and regulates the legal product. Just as the cost-of-living crisis had no impact on the price of cocaine, the de facto price of a pack of cigarettes from any shady retailer is a fiver.
It is the height of hubris to imagine that the generational tobacco will ‘create the first smokefree generation’, as Streeting claims. Cannabis has been banned for nearly a century and yet twice as many young people smoke joints as smoke tobacco. It was not always thus, but smoking rates among 16–24 year-olds have halved since 2020 when disposable vapes became popular. Naturally, the government is now going to ban disposable vapes.
And this is the real lunacy of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill as it stands.
Even if you don’t care about civil liberties, lost tax revenue or black markets, banning low-risk nicotine products while dragging tobacco into the war on drugs makes no sense from a public health perspective.
There is no health rationale for banning vaping outdoors (or indoors, for that matter), nor for including e-cigarettes and heated tobacco in the generational ban. It is said that cigarettes are a uniquely dangerous product and therefore an acceptable target for an outright ban. Very well, but what then is the justification for including heated tobacco, snuff and pipe tobacco which are, by definition, not uniquely dangerous – and none of them have any great appeal to minors. Why are cigars and shisha being banned? Even Rizla is included!
Disposable vapes are probably too politically toxic to be saved from prohibition, but they are overwhelmingly used by adults, and the government’s own Impact Assessment admits that banning them will cause many of them to “revert/re-lapse to smoking tobacco”. The same is true of any population-level policy that aims to clamp down on vaping. It is virtually impossible to design a policy that deters minors from using low-risk nicotine products without inadvertently pushing people of all ages towards combustible tobacco. We already have a law prohibiting underage sales of vapes. It is simply not being enforced.
The government has a huge majority and a penchant for social change.
There is no doubt that the Tobacco and Vapes Bill will soon be the Tobacco and Vapes Act, but if His Majesty’s loyal opposition chooses to oppose at least some aspects of it, it will have plenty to go at.
