Last week, former public health minister Steve Brine wrote in support of Sunak’s tobacco ban for Conservative Home.
Like nearly everyone who goes to the Department of Health, Brine went
native and has never recovered. His article is the usual blinkered
prohibitionist nonsense - he even denies that the ban will boost the
illicit trade - but he starts with a statistic that sounds credible.
Two-thirds of adults in Britain back the Government’s smoking ban plan, including nearly three-quarters of Conservative voters, in a representative poll carried out by YouGov for ASH.
He returns to this poll in his closing paragraph.
The public understand that the Government’s smoking ban will save lives and improve the health and wellbeing not just of individuals and their families but also of our economy. That is why the overwhelming majority of the public and parliamentarians support the legislation.
Since
87% of Britons do not smoke and the UK has become an oppresively
intolerant country in recent years, this claim wouldn’t surprise me. But
I know better than to trust an ASH survey. Before the smoking ban, they
conducted several polls claiming that most people wanted a total ban on
smoking in pubs. They achieved this by giving people a binary option
between smoking everywhere versus smoking nowhere. But when other polls
gave people the option of allowing separate smoking rooms, most people
were happy with that (and remained so for years after the ban was introduced).
The question ASH used in their latest survey is almost unbelievable:
“How strongly, if at all, do you support or oppose a goal to make Britain a country where no one smokes?”
You
will have noticed that there is no mention of ban there. There is no
mention of any policy, coercive or liberal, let alone the gradual
prohibition of all cigarettes, cigars, heated tobacco, shisha and
cigarette packs. It doesn’t show that ‘the overwhelming majority’
‘support the legislation’. It is just an aspiration, a ‘goal’. It would
be quite possible for a liberal who supports tobacco harm reduction but
hates the nanny state to agree with this ambition.
Read the rest on my Substack (free). And I have replied on Conservative Home today.
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