Oscar Gill-Lewis is a writer and political commentator with Young Voices UK and an editor for Speak Freely Magazine.
You would be forgiven for thinking this year’s election was a stonking rejection of the nanny-state Conservatives. But now that they have been kicked out of Downing Street, the Labour government which has replaced them only seems interested in furthering the Conservatives’ very worst ideas, such as the smoking ban.
Health secretary Wes Streeting has committed to following through with the Conservatives’ smoking ban. In fact, he wants to go even further, making the bill yet more restrictive. Economist Christopher Snowdon in an article for ConservativeHome likened it to putting a few bells and whistles on the bill, essentially wrapping a Conservative policy in Labour packaging. The policy’s origins lie in the New Zealand Labour Party.
Streeting’s beefed-up version of the bill will ban smoking outside hospitals, schools, and children’s play areas. Labour are also keeping the generational smoking ban whereby nobody born after January 2009 will be able to buy cigarettes. Admittedly, Streeting has been less bullish about banning smoking outside pubs, cafes, and restaurants, although the government has not ruled that out.
In a novel but depressing PR move, Streeting recently called for a ‘national debate’ about smoking in pub gardens. He hopes to overcome fearsome opposition from a debilitated and beat-up hospitality sector which has suffered decades of inappropriate government regulation and is still picking itself up from the Covid-19 assault.
Labour repackaging a Conservative policy belies a sad truth in modern British politics: our governments, of whatever coloured rosette, are drawn to soft authoritarianism. This world-first policy of unprecedented lifestyle restrictions enjoys cross-party support.
Governments seem comfortable confiscating our freedoms one morsel at a time, slowly chipping away at our liberties and cultural norms, but without any of the flashy aggression of actual authoritarianism. That way, we stiff-upper-lipped Brits don’t register it as a loss of freedoms, but a mere inconvenience, or perhaps even our civic duty to support the government in its latest noble quest to protect the NHS from those who use it and pay for it. We are like the frog in the pot of water being boiled alive so slowly we don’t notice until it is too late.
The slow attritional war against smokers has already reached ridiculous lengths. Cigarette packages are branded with ugly images. Various forms of smoking have been banned, like menthol cigarettes, pouches of rolling tobacco, and cigarette packs, depending on the weight and quantity.
The “we’re all in it together” public health justification for bans like these has found even more sympathetic ears in recent years after the Covid-19 pandemic and the NHS’s ever-growing deification in the UK population. This argument falls flat when one notices smokers are net contributors to the NHS due to the exorbitant tax they shell out. There is a 16.5% tax on the retail value of the pack, plus 23.7 cent per cigarette.
A ban on smoking outside pubs would decimate the hospitality sector even more than it has already suffered in the last few decades, but that isn’t the worst of it. The policy doesn’t make sense. Secondhand smoke outdoors has little to no effect on anyone else outdoors, and the scientific evidence for cancer by secondhand smoke is weak, at best.
If you don’t like being near someone smoking outdoors or you are worried for your child, feel free to move further away or politely ask the smoker to do so or not smoke, and they will likely happily oblige. The government has infantilised us so much that we feel the need to ask the ever-present hand of the government to solve our problems for us rather than take responsibility and action.
The core problem is that the smoking ban was introduced by the Conservative Party. The same party that introduced the sugar tax. The same party that encouraged NHS lionisation. The same party that infantilised people during the pandemic. The same party that justified its soft authoritarianism on the grounds of public health.
The problem with going down that road is that there’s no obvious stopping point. They will eventually come for any guilty pleasure you have, no matter how normal or harmless you think it is. Just look at Boris Johnson’s crusade against “junk food,” where Streeting also looks set to pick up the mantle.
The Conservatives suffered one of their worst ever losses in the last election. If the party wants to redeem itself and get back into office in 2029, it will require serious changes. The party needs to return to value individual freedoms and strongly oppose any proposal which compromises them. There is no other way. If the Conservatives don’t do this, Britain will only slip further down the rabbit hole of soft authoritarianism, led head-first by Labour. If both parties follow the same soft authoritarian programming, why would people vote for the Conservatives at all?
