Sunak is taking heat on smoking
The PM’s Tory opponents have seized on the issue as a dividing line
The Prime Minister is often described as a passionless political creature – a technocrat who can juggle spreadsheet numbers and sift to game the daunting electoral arithmetic. But few who know Rishi Sunak doubt that the proposed smoking ban, under which it would become impossible for anyone now aged 14 to ever legally buy cigarettes, has been a priority for him and an intended legacy.
It is also one of the things on which he is privately animated (apart from artificial intelligence – and many fewer people have a settled opinion on that than on smoking).
It is also a calculated risk for Sunak, who gave MPs a rare free vote on key policy commitments in the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, although it hardly comes within the usual realm of a “matter of conscience” issue.
In truth, he is finding that an issue which looked (and polled) like a certain plus for him is hard going – even though a minority of people smoke, hardly anyone argues that it is beneficial and, as one “Red Wall” MP helping to whip up support for the ban rather more cynically put it: “People like us banning stuff.”
The real reason why there was no formal pressure on MPs to back this legislation is that the Prime Minister has enough difficulty keeping some of his own Cabinet ministers on side – both Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt were weighing up which way to vote beforehand; Badenoch voted against and Mordaunt abstained – let alone the rest of the party.
The Government line is that most smokers wish they had never started and that the addictive nature of smoking effectively takes away the “choice” that libertarians love to cite.
But there are two problems – one being that the cost benefit will not kick in for a very long time and is hard to police, given that the ban on sales would apply to someone born in 2009, but not to their friend born the previous year. Unlike drugs policy (which is full of holes in itself), there can be no recourse to criminalising the informal supply of tobacco – as long as it is not sold.
Sunak does, however, have a solid case – echoed by Labour – which is that if you want to save money for a cash-strapped NHS and save some lives while you are at it, cutting smoking rates is a very good place to start. And though the policy is being reversed in New Zealand, where it was first mooted by Jacinda Ardern’s government, the reasons for that volte-face are a mixture of a tax grab and antielite campaigning. Plenty of other countries are mulling interventions to stub out smoking at a faster rate.
Even the best intentions, however, have a habit at the moment of turning into a Tory family row at a high decibel level.
How to curtail smoking, plus a tougher stance on marketing nicotine vapes, morphed from a serious debate about whether it is better to deter young people from taking up the habits via the education and tax systems – or to use the logic of the banning of smoking in pubs and restaurants, which was opposed at the time but has been widely accepted since.
Non-smokers like Liz Truss and Boris Johnson have embraced the defence of smoking with unhealthy zeal. Not, I suspect, because they much enjoy being around smokers – but because this has become the latest in a series of dividing lines, intended to shape the leadership contest after a Tory defeat.
In short, if Sunak was for something, a lot of people who either want revenge for losing out to him, or who want to succeed him, scented an opportunity to draw the dividing line as a defence of freedom from the “nanny state”, rather than a calculus of harms and benefits of changing the law. It has, as one veteran MP voting in favour of a ban puts it laconically, “become the new thing to shout about”.
For Truss and Johnson, the attack is partly about their prominence on the speech circuit, often with libertarian-included US audiences and a personal dislike of rules. In Truss’s case, this is more ideologically based than it is for Johnson, but it amounts to the same amount of ordnance being aimed at a Prime Minister they both dislike.
For the next generation of Tory leaders (in which camp Johnson cannot be ruled out), and also a new breed of bidders like Badenoch and Mordaunt seeking to garner votes from the right, as well as appealing to whatever rump of centrist Conservatives remains, looking that they are least sceptical about this bill sends a signal that they are not part of the grand nanny-state conspiracy, increasingly blamed by the “Pop Cons” for everything from overdoing Covid vaccination to an aversion to lifestyle taxes. (Truss wanted to axe the sugar tax, which was originally favoured by David Cameron.)
It is not only Tories who sometimes come a cropper in the territory of how far the state should go to save us from our less wholesome desires.
One of my fondest memories of watching a leader squirm on a niche subject was asking Tony Blair in an interview about a legal case brought by defenders of pornography in which – to put it delicately – harm occurred to the participants, even if they had explicitly agreed to this. The details were eye-popping.
As soon as the tape stopped, he turned in bemusement to Alastair Campbell, then his spin master, and asked helplessly: “Are we across this one?”
Sunak, to his credit, is well “across” the smoking problem and its consequences. His bill passed, with cross-party support. Along the way, however, this matter has shown that the appetite for strife and internal division is sharp and growing.
The Prime Minister hopes to stub out smoking. Good luck with that – it’s the bush fires on his own side causing most of the haze.
Non-smokers like Liz Truss and Boris Johnson have embraced the defence of smoking with unhealthy zeal