We’re creating a new generation of non-smokers

It’s nearly 20 years since I took my very last drag on either a cigarette or cigar – a statement which leaves me deeply conflicted. While I should really applaud a display of sustained willpower that has otherwise deserted me in life, I’ve always been more than slightly ashamed of the fact that I took up the filthy habit in the first place.

My smoker father succumbed to cancer – it was in his lungs, as well as many other parts of his body – at the criminally young age of 48 and, more than three decades on, I’ve never really gotten over watching this once mighty character fade and die in a matter of months.

In the years that immediately followed his untimely death, I was vehemently antismoking and used to tut my disapproval as my daft teenage mates skulked behind the bike sheds and the science blocks to sneak a drag of an Embassy or B&H.

Then came the most notable folly of my youth; it was a holiday with friends at the age of 17 and, like millions of others before and since, I decided that smoking made me much cooler and more interesting.

It took me more than 10 years to stub out the habit for good and I definitely noticed the benefits – both health and financial – almost instantly but I wish I’d never started down that particular path in the first place.

Which is why I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the plan to effectively phase out smoking by making it illegal for everyone who was born in 2009 and beyond to ever buy cigarettes in this country.

Although the plan was comfortably voted through in the House of Commons recently after gaining the support of all of the major political parties, it isn’t without its fierce critics with 57 Conservative

MPS voting against their Prime Minister’s proposal.

We’ve had the inevitable hand-wringing and cries of it being the clearest sign yet that we inhabit a nanny state.

This particular ‘nanny state’ happens to be one where the 50-year-olds of the 2060s face the indignity of being asked to show their ID when attempting to buy a packet of 20 cigs.

But common sense says that the reality is that this new law will mean that a habit that is already on the wane really will be something that people used to do, due to its inaccessibility.

This change of law doesn’t deprive the rights of those who still enjoy a puff but it does give a generation – including my 14-year-old – a genuine chance of swerving a habit that has cost far too many lives.