Nagging is no help and the Nanny State needs to butt out

FIVE years ago, almost to the day, I sat down at my kitchen table, lit up a cigarette, drew in deeply and made one of the best decisions of my life.

‘Enjoy this one, soldier, because it’s your last,’ I said to myself. ‘After this, you’re an ex-smoker.’

Achieving a state of mind where you are ready to conquer an addiction can be a long, painful and personal journey. For me it took extended bouts of self-reproach and the drip-drip of horror stories percolating through every nicotine hit: tales of men not much older than me in cancer wards, wracked with regret they did not take charge earlier and end the pernicious habit before it ended them.

It took careful consideration of the illnesses which had killed grandparents – and reflection on the fact surviving to become a grandparent one day sounded rather more fun than being a photo in a family album.

What it did not take was haranguing or bullying or demonisation from the Scottish Government.

The political philosophy – rampant in this country – that the solution to every societal ill is to remove ownership of the problem from the individual was, if anything, counterproductive. Government interference in my life, my issue, just made me tetchy. Sometimes I’d reach for something to calm me down.

Yet, like domineering parents, our SNP masters are hellbent on making our decisions for us. So much so that the primary driver among those exercising their free will to have ice cream and chocolate sauce, down as many units of alcohol as they damn well please or chain smoke Marlboro Reds is increasingly one of defiance.

Desist

The figures for people who continue to smoke in flagrant breach of the Government’s policy that everyone in the land must desist bears this out. Around 850,000 Scots – or one in five adults – are smokers, and while that figure is down considerably on a generation ago, it has hardly moved in the last few years.

The SNP state’s response to this non-compliant rump? Why, to get even tougher, of course, to exert yet more control and thus steer our wee bit hill and glen ever further into the Soviet-era waters where politicians who don’t understand concepts such as personal responsibility invariably find the air most pleasing.

The latest raft of measures to compel Scots to get on board with the state directive that their country will be tobaccofree by 2034 include no-smoking clauses in council and housing association tenancy agreements, compulsory reductions in nicotine levels in cigarettes and – ludicrously – health warnings stamped on individual cigarettes.

One presumes the last of these is just in case the unsuspecting puffer missed the ‘Smoking Kills’ legend in letters an inch high on his pack of 20 – and didn’t catch any of the last half-century of negative publicity surrounding the humble fag. You cannot be too careful – or, it seems, too paternalistic.

And one has to hope that our ministerial nannies grasp that nicotine is not the deadly ingredient of a cigarette, merely the addictive one. Reducing nicotine content, arguably at least, could increase consumption.

But it is the idea that smokers will allow themselves to be bullied out of their addiction through phased crackdowns on the places where they can indulge it which bears the least scrutiny.

If the ban on smoking in pubs introduced under Labour First Minister Jack McConnell taught us anything, it is that it takes more than a little inconvenience to abandon the habit of a lifetime.

Pavement smoking became a thing; so did pubs with smokers’ verandahs and outdoor heaters. Sadly for the licensed trade, so did sitting at home with a can and a ciggie.

If you know anyone who stopped smoking because a government stopped them smoking in pubs then you know a meeker brand of addict than I do.

I have witnessed people subjecting themselves to the direst of weather conditions, to the most acrid airport smoking pens and to the rankest of repartee in service of their habit. And I have been among them, drawing away grimly.

It’s a personal thing. They will stop when they are ready. Or, and this is the thing about personal responsibility, they won’t.

Now, 12 years after cigarettes were banished from pubs, we have a government irredeemably hooked on state bans encroaching ever further into our lives – so far, in fact, that they have arrived in our very homes.

In the circumstances it does not seem unreasonable to suggest it seeks help for its own addiction first. This constant intrusion in our personal affairs is a grubby habit, not to say creepy.

Tyranny

None of this is to express any regret that my smoking days are over. I am overjoyed to be free from the dominion of a weed which I did not require, which made my clothes and home smell and which reduced my life expectancy.

But this was my problem to solve, not our government’s.

We who unshackle ourselves from the tyranny of addiction do not do so to exist under another tyranny – that of the micro-manager state eroding freedoms by slapping bans on this, minimum prices on that and sugar limits on the other.

That isn’t government; it’s condescendence, it’s playing mum to grown-ups and it’s time to butt out.