The public has spoken but the PM isn’t listening
Tuesday, January 30, 2024 at 9:15 A new poll has found that almost two thirds of adults in Britain say that when people are 18 and legally an adult they should be allowed to purchase cigarettes and other tobacco products.
The survey, conducted by Yonder Consulting for Forest, found that 64% of respondents think that if a person can vote, drive a car, join the army, buy alcohol, and possess a credit card at 18, they should also be allowed to purchase tobacco.
Only a quarter (26%) said they should not be allowed to purchase tobacco products when they are legally an adult at 18, while 10% said 'don't know'.
Interestingly, we asked the same question in November and on that occasion 58% said adults aged 18+ should be allowed to purchase tobacco, 32% said ‘should not’, and 10% said ‘don’t know’.
Coincidentally, publication of the new poll coincided with the announcement on Sunday evening that the Government is to proceed with a bill to prohibit the sale of tobacco to future generations of adults, and ban the sale of disposable vapes.
There are also plans to restrict vape flavours, introduce plain packaging for vapes, and change how they are displayed in shops so they don’t appeal to children.
I expected to be busier, media wise, but most reports and interviews (including the handful I did yesterday) focused on the disposable vape ban.
Likewise, the one comment the Press Association picked from the Forest press release issued on Sunday was not about the tobacco sales ban but about vapes.
Guido Fawkes ran a story about the Forest poll here, and it included a direct response from former prime minister Liz Truss:
“This is what I am hearing from people I speak to in my South West Norfolk constituency. People want under-18s to be protected. They don’t want adults’ freedoms to be restricted. I fear this is a slippery slope.”
The former PM’s full reaction to the Government’s announcement that it is pressing ahead with plans to ban the sale of tobacco products to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, read:
“While the state has a duty to protect children from harm, in a free society, adults must be able to make their own choices about their own lives.
“Banning the sale of tobacco products to anyone born in 2009 or later will create an absurd situation where adults enjoy different rights based on their birthdate.
“A Conservative government should not be seeking to extend the nanny state. This will only give succour to those who wish to ban further choices of which they don't approve.
“The newly-elected National government in New Zealand is already reversing the generational tobacco ban proposed by the previous administration.
“The Government urgently needs to follow suit and reverse this profoundly unconservative policy."
Asked about his predecessor’s response, Rishi Sunak is reported to have said, “I don’t think there’s anything unconservative about caring about our children’s health”, which suggests he doesn’t understand the point that opponents of the policy are making.
Of course there’s nothing “unconservative about caring for our children’s health”. But when “our children” are 18 they are legally adults and whilst, as parents, we will continue to care about their health, it is ultimately their choice - not ours - how they live their lives, and what risks they take, and as parents we have to respect that.
The idea that we should dictate our children’s lifestyle long after they have grown up and left home, is absurd.
In one respect however the PM is correct. The policy is not entirely ‘unconservative’ because there is a long history of paternalism in the Conservative Party.
Banning the sale of tobacco to future generations is nevertheless a radical departure for a Tory government that nine months ago dismissed the idea as "too big a departure" and said it wasn't going to pursue it.
Anyway, I’m grateful to Liz Truss for her intervention. Following her short and turbulent period in office it’s easy for people to mock the former PM and criticise anything she says, but I have enormous respect for politicians who stick to their principles, and in this case Truss is doing just that.
After entering Parliament in 2010, she voted in favour of an amendment to the smoking ban that would have allowed separate smoking rooms. She subsequently voted against plain packaging, and I think she also voted against the ban on smoking in cars carrying children, so her response to a generational tobacco sales ban is entirely consistent.
Sunak, on the other hand, simply wants to leave a legacy. Sometimes this is no bad thing. In this instance, however, targeting smoking smacks of opportunism bordering on desperation, and it’s not a good look.
Reader Comments (2)
This policy is clearly so popular it is sinking the Tories and making them unelectable in future. Why should anyone vote Conservative now? If Tories are going to pursue Labour policies then what is the point of a Conservative party?
It's clearly true that Sunak is using our children for his own gains to secure that minor footnote in history without giving a damn that criminalisation will harm them when they grow to be adults if they want to be as free as generations before them were for hundreds of years. The man is a political lobbyists' puppet who clearly does not have a single idea of his own.
Regarding the vaping bans, well, we hate to say we told you so but in throwing smokers and smoking under the bus repeatedly these last couple of decades inevitably meant that vapers and vaping would be dragged under with us.
It's never been about health. It's always been about freedom of choice and if Vapers fought so ferociously for the right to smoke as well as the right to vape then maybe they would not now find themselves targeted like we have been for several decades before them.
Meanwhile they still don't get it.
My word, some of the utter crap I've seen written about smoking and smokers from some Vapers acting like toddlers who just had their dummy taken is incredulous.
Vapers should stop trying to claim victim status. No one of power or influence is buying the argument that ecigs save lives but they can ultimately be persuaded via a joint campaign that adults should be free to make their own informed legitimate choices without fear of state harassment, discrimination or criminalisation.
All Vapers have achieved is to hand government a medicinal tool to force smokers to switch. Sunak says vaping is so dangerous it can only be worthy of use by people who smoke but he won't say out loud it is because our lives have been so devalued by anti smoker lobbyists over decades that no one cares if vaping kills as long as virtue signalling, vacuous anti smoker puppets like Sunak can play politics.
Never before in the history of this country have so many been let down by so few.
The public has spoken and the government should listen to that and to what the people prefer and have to say, is the fundamentals of democracy and of having democracy and democratic governance. The majority of the parliament does not identify with the majority of everyone else in our country. In each case it doesn't or it depends what else happens. When the majority disagrees with something it should not happen at all. Yet things with which the majority disagrees have unfortunately still taken place in our country despite the existence of democracy. The parliament is not to decide on decisions that belong separately to each person, because then those decisions are stolen from where they belong, and things cannot become law when they are not first social rules. Laws that prevent crime had to be social rules first, before they could become laws, and smoking indoors together with buying cigarettes from an age of legal responsibility is not a crime or guilty to do, which means that nothing is being punished, other than the personal preference and choice of that person writing the law himself in the absence of society. Punishment should always be directed against guilt and under no circumstances must apply to innocence, yet this is what the government has done when it comes to smoking indoors or decorating cigarette wrappers with ingenuity signalling, or even buying cigarettes from an age of legal responsibility, which everyone is entitled and has the right to do, and should also have the legal right to do. To deal with such problems states have founded national constitutions that limit the otherwise limitless power of politicians to restrict citizens by legislating arbitrarily. Writing laws having the nature of smoking bans and plain packaging legislation and even adult smoking prohibitions are underestimating our knowledge and intelligence to be in a position to know that it cannot happen based on our constitution, and challenge citizens to believe it and to believe that the constitution has not yet restricted those politicians from taking other people's decisions as their own and that the matter under their command and its negotiation can be voted upon by a mere representative parliamentary majority which does not give the same result as the majority of a poll or the actual majority of all the people. Political power is not nevertheless limitless, it is limited by the constitution and its abuse and its reversal against those it is directed at who have elected those who possess it is punishable not by the law they attempt to arbitrarily set against them, when they punish innocent actions of their own choosing, that deserve no punishment, but by the constitution they must comply to. When they say that we will make it a crime to buy tobacco products by anyone born after that date or will make this or the other a crime, remember that it is not already a crime to become one, it is not a crime to buy tobacco products from an adult, or even not to smoke inside buildings, against anybody else who would claim that in the courts, not against them or directed against them, so it cannot become one just because one person who has control over it wants it to become. That is called a social rule, and crimes claim their status from our social rules and those become the law, what they have decided on their own is not a social rule and should not become the law under any circumstances if the law is not in the form of a social rule. Laws should not be arbitrarily defined in the absence of society by the state on its own, and that is another problem that should be realised. We have to set all this straight and learn it in order to claim our rights from what's happening. Fortunately, we do not live in a dictatorship, but in a constitutional monarchy, where all the actions of the politicians must meet the written approval of the state constitution, the Magna Carta from 1215. Unjust laws should never be passed again with a parliamentary majority on its own, they should be challenged by the courts and be cancelled by them by providing the judiciary with the correct argumentation.