With smoking, the Rubicon is now in the rear view mirror. It is less than a year since Rishi Sunak announced his plan to gradually prohibit the sale of tobacco. His successor, Keir Starmer, recently admitted that his government is considering some form of outdoor smoking ban. These developments are remarkable not just because they are illiberal but because they do not even pretend to respect freedom of choice. Until last year, anti-smoking campaigners would swear on a stack of Bibles that they were not prohibitionists. Their policies might have a negative impact on adults who choose to smoke but that was not, supposedly, the intention. For most of their campaigns it was children who were weaponised. Tobacco advertising had to be banned because it seduced children. Branding and shop displays had to be banned for the same reason. Taxes had to rise to make cigarettes unaffordable to children. Occasionally, they would claim to be acting on behalf of other groups of people — slim cigarettes had to be banned because they appealed to women, and smoking in pubs had to be banned to “protect” bar staff — but the activists still insisted that they were not infringing on adults’ right to smoke. Your cigarettes might be covered in disgusting photos but you could still buy them. You might not be able to smoke in a pub, but you could always nip outside.
To put it in economic terms, they appealed to market failure and negative externalities. The arguments were disingenuous, but if you squinted enough you could squeeze them into a framework that was just about consistent with British liberalism.
Not any more. The justification for the latest diktats is distinctly more Iranian and can be summarised as “Smoking is bad for you, we don’t like it and we’re going to stop you doing it.”
Read the rest at The Critic.
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