I was on TalkTV on Monday.
I was invited to discuss Labour’s plan to consult on banning or progressively raising the age of sale of tobacco to eradicate smoking.
It was one of those rare interviews where I was able to talk without being interrupted all the time, either by the presenter or another guest.
Towards the end however presenter Ian Collins suggested (not unreasonably since he had to play devil's advocate), that it "would be far better to live in a world that was smoke free”. Naturally I demurred, arguing that:
Of course there are some people who are addicted to smoking and wished they had never taken it up but there are also a great many people who enjoy smoking, get pleasure from smoking, or perhaps they take comfort from smoking, and if you are an adult and you choose to smoke a legal product that choice has to be respected ...
Then there are social smokers who are not addicted to tobacco. They simply enjoy it when they go out for an evening and they are outside a pub and they have got a drink in their hand. They like to have a cigarette and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that as long as the person doing it knows that there is a potential health risk and of course they need to be considerate to people around them, and most smokers these days are.
So I think we have just got to move on a bit. We've got enough rules, regulations, laws, legislation to do with smoking. We don't need the government interfering any more. When you think of all the problems that the future governments are going to be expected to deal with, whether it’s the economy, the NHS, the idea that we should be tackling smoking is absolutely ridiculous because actually, on purely financial grounds, it’s said to cost the NHS £2.5 billion a year to deal with tobacco-related diseases but smokers contribute over £10 billion a year through tobacco taxation and VAT. So smokers more than pay their way in society. They are not a drain on the nation’s resources.
Funnily enough, when I mentioned social smokers I could see him nodding his head and it turns out that Collins is a social smoker himself because after the interview had finished ("Nice argument outlined there from Simon Clark"!) he told listeners:
I kind of socially smoke and really enjoy [it] and every now and then I will go into a bit of a phase ... I’ll socially smoke on a Saturday, then I will carry on smoking until Wednesday, but broadly speaking I will smoke when I have a couple of drinks and I enjoy smoking when I have a couple of drinks.
Update: Chris Snowdon has written an article for Spiked, The road to prohibition, in which he states:
The public consultation mooted by Wes Streeting makes it almost inevitable that the UK will emulate the Kiwis [and progressively ban the sale of cigarettes to future generations]. The public-health blob will inundate the consultation with carbon-copied responses in favour of prohibition, and if the government declines to introduce the policy or decides to wait for further evidence, nanny-state activists will portray this as a ‘u-turn’ and accuse Streeting of being in the pocket of the tobacco industry. That is exactly what happened in the plain-packaging campaign.
I've spoken and written about creeping prohibition many times so I share some of Chris's pessimism. Nevertheless even I think it's unnecessarily defeatist to be talking like this at this stage.
Prohibition of tobacco is not, in my view, inevitable and politicians must understand that if they choose that path they're in for a hell of a fight.
The question (as I touched on yesterday) is, who's up for it?