Ukip’s new deputy leader supports complete ban on smoking
Wednesday, October 19, 2022 at 11:20 Oh to be a fly on the wall when Ukip leader Neil Hamilton discusses the party’s policy on smoking with his new deputy Rebecca Jane.
Remember Ukip?
In the 2014 European Parliament election the Nigel Farage-led party won the largest number of seats (24) in the UK with 27 per cent of the vote.
The result forced David Cameron to commit the Conservative party to a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union if he won a majority in the subsequent general election and the rest, as they say, is history.
Today, sans Farage, Ukip is unrecognisable from the party whose vibrant conference I attended on behalf of Forest in September 2014.
(The Hands Off Our Packs campaign had a stand in the exhibition area that Farage had promised to visit. He did but 24 hours after we expected him and I missed his show of support because I had nipped out of the hall for a sandwich!)
A few months earlier I was one of millions who voted for Ukip in the 2014 European election but it’s the first and only time I voted for the party because I never bought the idea that Ukip represented a more liberal (or libertarian) form of conservatism.
I knew for example that any commitment to amending the smoking ban or opposing plain packaging and other punitive tobacco control measures was driven almost entirely by Farage, not the party at large.
This became clear the first time he stood down as leader in 2009 because it was obvious that his successor Lord Pearson had absolutely no interest in the subject.
Truth is Ukip has never been a libertarian party and the idea that it was or could have been is one of the great political myths.
To be fair to Neil Hamilton, a very good friend of the late Lord Harris (chairman of Forest from 1986 until his death in 2006), he has been a consistent opponent of the smoking ban hence my fly on the wall comment because the first time I saw Rebecca Jane was on Good Morning Britain in 2018 when she was calling for smoking in the street to be made illegal.
Whether she actually believed that or was just fulfilling the GMB producers’ brief to be controversial I don’t know, but it wasn’t the only time she’s taken a pop at smoking.
In June 2021, again on Good Morning Britain, she called for a complete ban on smoking in public. “One hundred per cent smokers should just be banned in general,” she said.
The following month I was invited to discuss the subject ‘Should smoking be banned in the UK?’ with Mark Dolan on GB News. I was on one side of the debate, Rebecca Jane was on the other.
This week her mission is to #UniteTheRight by bringing together various fringe parties that purport to be on the right.
They include the Reclaim Party led by Laurence Fox (a smoker), and Reform led by former Brexit Party MEP Richard Tice. She’s even reached out to Farage, another smoker (via Twitter of course).
So far only the Reclaim Party has accepted her invitation to talk but it all seems a bit desperate to me.
I can only imagine that by appointing Rebecca Jane as deputy leader Ukip hope to benefit from her media profile, such as it is.
They’ve nothing to lose in terms of their current credibility but it might help if the leader and deputy leader were on the same page with something as fundamental as choice and civil liberties.
Reader Comments (3)
UKIP is a dead party so there is no need to worry that anyone will take it seriously anymore. There are plenty of other authoritarian smokerphobic bullies to vote for in the main parties without having to resort to voting for an opportunist.
Politicians and wannabes still don't get that it's not really about right or left in politics anymore but degrees of libertarianism and authoritarianism that attract the voters.
Shame about Lawrence Fox's party jumping aboard the anti smoker bandwagon. I had expected better.
To be fair to Laurence Fox, I would be surprised if he’s aware of Rebecca Jane’s position on smoking. Ditto Neil Hamilton. The only reason I am is because it’s part of my job to monitor these things but I agree that in the overall scheme of things it’s unimportant.
I get the feeling that the smoking issue is not of importance or priority to Fox or many others who see it as too trivial either way as a hill to die on.
I agree with you on a former post that despite ASH pushing that most people are anti smoker, I find in reality that most don't give a damn one way or another precisely because smoking is deemed as a trivial issue.
Only those directly and adversely affected by smoker persecution like me, or those involved in persecuting smokers because their funding and salaries are dependent on it, like ASH, see it as the most important issue of the modern age of politics.