Labour, law and libertarians

In an interview with The Times published on Saturday Labour's shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said he is ready to take on the libertarian right over smoking.

I have news for him. The libertarian right, such as it is, has largely given up defending the right to smoke.

Today they’re more interested in supporting vaping as the free market ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of smoking.

Or promoting the legalisation of cannabis which is way more trendy than tobacco even if many users choose to smoke it.

But when it comes to defending the practice of smoking tobacco you can often hear a pin drop.

According to The Times, which only recently ran a leading article (‘Stub it out’) supporting New Zealand style policies to achieve a ‘smoke free’ England by 2030:

New Zealand has introduced a law which means that nobody now under the age of 14 will ever be permitted to buy cigarettes, and [Streeting] is interested in doing something similar here.

That was on Saturday. The next morning Streeting appeared on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg (BBC One). Labour, he confirmed, ‘would consult on banning the sale and purchase of cigarettes as part of a “radical” package of measures to stamp out smoking’.

Mea culpa, I was unaware of the Kuenssberg interview and Streeting’s comments until Sunday afternoon when I saw they had been widely reported online.

Forest’s reaction was therefore too late for those reports, many of which were generated (I think) by the Press Association which, not for the first time, didn’t bother to contact Forest for a response.

We did belatedly get some comments out there (here, here and here, for example) and yesterday I did a couple of interviews, one on BBC Radio Ulster, the other on TalkTV, but from the free market/libertarian right all I could see and hear was silence, even on social media.

The notable exception was a post by Alex Singleton (The nanny state of it all) on the ASI blog. Alex writes:

In a free country, people should have the freedom to take part in activities that affect themselves without having hectoring moralisers try to use the power of the state to prevent them.

Far from creating “new Tobacco Control Plan”, politicians should realise that they have already gone too far by preventing smoking rooms in pubs, and abandon the ludicrous, moralising “smokefree by 2030” agenda, which is an attack on people’s free choice and would just expand criminal activity.

A little over 20 years ago Alex co-founded the Liberty Club at St Andrews University. Having gone to school in St Andrews I leapt at the chance to speak to the group and I remember the occasion with fondness.

But I was only one of many who made that pilgrimage. Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox), director of the Academy of Ideas which runs the annual Battle of Ideas, was another.

Claire, I think, would consider herself to be on the libertarian left (a term that some people on the right used to sneeringly consider an oxymoron) but in my experience the libertarian left is far truer to the spirit of the word than their counterparts on the right who are more driven by market trends than libertarian or even classical liberal principles.

Anyway, thank goodness for individuals like Alex Singleton who have stayed true to the libertarian values they espoused when they were younger.

As I have always said, supporting the rights of smokers - even if you don’t smoke yourself - is the true test of a genuine liberal.

Abandon the rights of adults who choose to smoke and you abdicate the right to call yourself a liberal, let alone a libertarian.

As for Wes Streeting’s comments, I don’t think we should be too alarmed just yet. Labour, after all, isn’t even in power.

Nevertheless, when politicians fly a kite to see what reaction they get it’s best not to ignore it. Just saying.

See also: End of the cigarette? Labour unveil plan to wipe out smoking by 2030 by banning sale of tobacco (LBC)

C-stores slam Labour’s proposal to consult on cigarette sales ban (Convenience Store)

Campaigners slam threat to ban UK cigarette sales (Tobacco Reporter)

Below: The Liberty Club of St Andrews on No Smoking Day, 2002

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

I initially thought Wes Streeting was a Tory. The parties are so alike these days that it is difficult to tell them apart. After all, it was the Tories who launched this stupid idea in the first place and so it seems Streeting is jumping aboard the bandwagon in hope to pick up votes from the intolerants whether left or right. I do agree with you btw about the faux libertarians on the right who just want to push vaping at people and screw personal freedom for those who choose to smoke.

I am not so complacent that I think we do not need to worry about the extremist Labour party and it's dangerous ideas. The Tories have been in power too long, have barely done anything to put right or address those issues people are concerned about, including reigning in the puritan healthist extremists and ideologues who still sit far too close to power and decision making, and voters are generally bored with them and want change. Change for the sake of change is often more of a vote winner than anything else.

I have been undecided for a long time about which way to vote or even if it is worth voting at all because none of the parties represent me but serve a minority of professional anti choice lobbyists, and all of them want to make life more difficult. But now at least I see how dangerously ideological and naively manipulated Labour politicians are so the safest bet is to vote anything that stops Labour gaining power. This would be an even more miserable country if they did.

[Misty]

What never ceases to amaze me is how so few people can see what dangerous precedents these “ground breaking” new rules set for future zealots who stand against whatever they happen not to like at the moment.

Now, I’m no lawyer, but I’m amazed that not a single concern has been raised by the legal profession at the proposal of such a very clear age-discriminatory law. It’s one thing to have a law which demands that everyone waits until they are 16, 17 or 18 to buy or to do a certain thing, because that’s fair – everyone has to wait for the same length of time. But to have a two-tier law system whereby some people are allowed to do something because they reached the requisite age in time, but other people are never allowed to do it, because they were born too late is, quite simply, not fair. And isn’t fairness supposed to be what our whole legal system exists to try and ensure? You know – “all equals before the law” and all that? Or has our legal system now become so corrupted and infiltrated by powerful Government bodies and lobby groups that their purpose now is to ensure primarily that the proles are doing as they are told by “their betters”? Because it certainly seems that way from the silence which has greeted each and every unfair and spiteful piece of anti-smoking legislation so far. Not one single lawyer, to my knowledge, has uttered so much as a peep about “precedent” – historically one of the most fundamental and basic tenets of our legal system.

Indeed, in the wake of any such law being proclaimed as “hugely successful” (as it inevitably will be, whether it is or not – like the pub-shutting smoking ban was), what’s to stop the rabid Greenies demanding that the legal age for driving private cars be gradually raised, in order to achieve (for example), “a 50% reduction in the number of cars on the road”? Or the anti-sugar brigade insisting that the age of customers to whom confectionery can be sold is gradually raised “to avoid children from getting hooked on chocolates and sweeties” for the sake of their future health? Or the anti-alcohol adherents from suggesting that the age for purchasing alcohol be steadily raised “for the health of the nation” or “to reduce alcohol-related crime and accidents”? We’ve already seen many of the new prohibitionists on the block actively connecting their own pet-hate with anti-tobacco’s methods – “should be treated like tobacco” or “as bad as smoking” have been used by non-smoking-related campaign groups almost from the get-go after the smoking ban was imposed. There must be millions of little single-issue campaign groups positively drooling at the possibilities which will open up for them if this precedent is accepted. Am I the only person who is seeing this? It sometimes seems like it.

These really are issues which anyone – smoker or non-smoker – should be much more deeply concerned about than anyone actually seems to be. Pretty much all and any anti-smoking rules, regulations and legislation really are no longer "just about smoking" - if they ever were, that is - and, these days, are usually just a foot in the door for the application of similar rules in whatever other direction the most powerful (or loudest) campaigners of the moment want the law to go.