Smoking ban is a sign of the times
The Tories have pressed ahead with the closest thing they have to a vision. Emily Hohler reports
Rishi Sunak’s flagship smoking ban is almost certainly “here to stay” despite vocal opposition to the second reading of the Tobacco and Vapes bill on Tuesday night, says Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. The bill passed by 383 votes to 67, with just 57 out of the 347 Conservative MPs voting against. Sunak promised at last year’s Tory conference to create the first “smokefree generation” by banning smoking for anyone born after 2009. The ban is backed by the “overwhelming majority of doctors, nurses and health charities” as well as the governments of all four UK nations, with polls suggesting that a “substantial majority of the public” support it as well, writes Chris Whitty in The Guardian. The bill will also substantially reduce the “unacceptable” practice of vape companies marketing to children.
Although smoking rates are declining – from 21% in 2007 to 13% today – around 80,000 people die each year in the UK as a result of smoking and many more are harmed. The ban, which was inspired by an initiative in New Zealand that was eventually dropped to save money for tax cuts, will save more lives than any other single policy, according to Whitty. Although those who opposed it are “out of step” with the public, the vote did provide a chance for Tory MPs to “burnish” their libertarian credentials, say Anna Gross and Jim Pickard in the Financial Times.
The debate made me want to light up, says Tim Stanley in The Telegraph. There’s “nothing more depressing than watching MPs – left and nominally right – compete to choke your liberties”. Liz Truss “laid into the “finger-wagging, nannying control freaks”, noting that the same “health police” who wished to save children from nicotine only five minutes ago favoured prescribing pills to block puberty.
Truss touts her surplus zeal
The degree of state intrusion into what used to be considered “our private space in the name of the public good” is troubling, agrees Philip Johnston in the same paper. Many seem to want an “avuncular arm thrown around their shoulder, guiding them through life”, but we now live in a world where the police investigate people’s views and universities don’t recommend books that “might upset students”. “No nation can exist without rules and regulations, but there must be limits.” The “modern fetish is to control every aspect of our lives and behaviour, even when we have grown up and should make decisions for ourselves. Will future generations even be capable of doing so? A Conservative prime minister searching for a legacy should turn back this tide, not send it further up the beach”.
This debate highlights the fact that the “closest thing Downing Street has to a vision of the future is Britain as a country where smoking gets a bit more illegal every year”, says Rafael Behr in The Guardian. Sunak has surrendered control over the “debate about the future of Conservatism”. This is concerning, not least because it “creates a void for Truss to tout her surplus zeal”. “The ludicrous messenger discredits the message,” but her argument still stands as the “most prominent expression” of Tory beliefs, which has as its “core proposition… a facile cult of political freedom, defined as minimal taxation and horror of state interventions that prioritise collective social obligation over individual enterprise. A fundamentalist concept of liberty is then used to flush out a disparate coalition of enemies – like the Chinese Communist Party, Joe Biden’s industrial strategy, woke academia, unsupportive journalists, the UK Supreme Court and, of course, the European Union.” And while it is better to have a “conspiracy cult in opposition than in government, the health of British democracy will suffer” if the Tory party “flees the arena of rational debate”.