Go on, minister, surprise me

As I mentioned on Friday, public health minister Neil O'Brien will tomorrow give the Government’s response to last year’s Khan review: making smoking obsolete.

The advertised speech, ‘Achieving Smokefree 2030: Cutting Smoking and Stopping Kids Vaping', is expected to include proposals that may, or may not, be subject to a public consultation, although we all know how those end.

Yesterday, thanks to a press release issued over the weekend, it was revealed (in advance) how the Government intends to ‘stop kids vaping’. According to the BBC:

An enforcement squad made up of trading standards officers will be set up to carry out test purchases and clamp down on shops selling vapes to under-18s.

The fact that the Government chose to announce that initiative ahead of O’Brien’s speech suggests that ministers want the main focus tomorrow to be on smoking, not children vaping, which is probably seen as a distraction, especially as promoting vaping is one of four core recommendations in the Khan review.

Javed Khan’s report featured 15 recommendations although several included more than one policy proposal.

Recommendations included raising the age of sale by one year every year until no-one can legally buy tobacco, more money (£125m a year) to pay for additional smoking cessation services and anti-smoking campaigns, and increasing tobacco duty by more than 30%.

Other proposals included a ban on supermarkets selling tobacco, radically rethinking how cigarette sticks and packets look, and tackling portrayals of smoking in the media.

The review also recommended banning smoking in more outdoor public spaces, while local authorities ‘should make a significant proportion (70% or more) of new social housing tenancies and new developments smoke free’.

Although Khan highlighted four principal recommendations (increasing investment in smoke free policies, increasing the age of sale, promoting vaping, and improving prevention of illness to help the NHS), the scattergun approach to tobacco control did the review no favours because it seemed to many of us that Khan had simply included every crackpot idea suggested to him during his meetings with tobacco control campaigners, with the result that the report lost credibility.

Nevertheless the Government has to throw Khan, and the anti-smoking industry, a bone or two and I suspect that raising the age of sale from 18 to 21 may be one of them.

Hopefully I’m wrong but it worries me that the Government is still committed to achieving a ‘smoke free England’ (sic) by 2030 when it is almost certainly unachievable without the sort of draconian policies that ought to be incompatible with a society that values freedom of choice and personal responsibility.

I used to think these were Conservative values too but those days are long gone.

Tomorrow, Neil O’Brien could put clear blue water between the Conservatives and Labour by standing up for individual liberty and the freedom to make ‘bad’ choices.

He could do this by emphasising the need to allow adults to make informed decisions, recognising and respecting the fact that sometimes those choices might go against the prevailing orthodoxy.

He won’t because a paternalistic Conservative government has embraced a new form of socialism that dictates how we live, eat and breathe.

By all means promote vaping as a healthier alternative to smoking - given the evidence, I have no problem with that - but if adults (and we are all adults at 18) choose to smoke in preference to vaping (or quitting altogether) that choice MUST be respected and no-one should be punished for their habit or bullied until they stop.

Go on, minister. Surprise me.

Update: My attempt to register to listen to Neil O’Brien’s speech in person at Policy Exchange tomorrow has received a not unexpected response.

In red letters, it reads: ‘Not approved’.

Fancy that.

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

It is no surprise that as the representative of the little consumer who chooses to smoke that you would be banned from having any say against the persecution and bullying that has already been decided by the lobbyists in control of this weak and worthless Government.

They have been pushing a public hate campaign for decades which is illegal against any other group of people except for those so demonised that they are not recognised as fellow humans anymore. Sound familiar?

I wonder when we will be forced to quit camps or prison? It surely cannot be so far away now since criminalisation is just around the corner and once illegal, any hater can do anything to us in the name of the law and with a clear conscience too. Shameful.