The prime minister’s illiberal legacy
Thursday, February 1, 2024 at 10:52 Fair play to The Spectator.
The magazine has outdone itself this week with a cover and feature article whose headline says it all: ‘How the Tories gave up on liberty’.
Written by Kate Andrews, the magazine’s economics editor, it should be read by every Conservative MP.
Referring to both the generational tobacco ban and the proposed ban on disposable vapes, she writes:
It’s difficult to take away established rights and legal products from adults who already enjoy them. What this government plans to do instead is to take them away from those who are less likely to complain. You don’t miss what you never knew.
That’s why the proposed legislation is so cowardly. The prime minister is picking on a minority whose numbers (in relation to smoking tobacco) have been in decline for decades and are currently at their lowest recorded levels in every age group.
That’s why we’ve read and heard so little about the generational ban in recent weeks. It won’t affect most people, including existing adult smokers, so few people - including newspaper editors - care.
Those that do are dismissed as a ‘tiny minority of the electorate’ whose views, presumably, are irrelevant.
But Kate Andrews has an answer to that:
More important than any single piece of evidence [about the health risks] is that adults should have the right to make personal choices about how they live their lives. Smokers will die younger on average, but this is a risk they are informed about on every cigarette packet.
Crucially, she adds:
It’s not simply smoking that MPs are about to phase out of existence, but the principle that a person should be allowed to determine his or her own destiny.
If you’re a subscriber, you may have read the article already. If you’re not I urge you to buy a copy and send it to your MP, if he or she is a Conservative.
We can dream, but it may give some pause for thought before many of them vote, with Labour MPs, to ban the sale of tobacco to all future generations of adults in the UK.
PS. One Conservative MP who will almost certainly vote against the ban is Philip Davies. (If he doesn’t I’ll be very disappointed!)
I’m pleased to say that next week Philip is hosting a small reception at the House of Commons to address this very issue.
It’s not a big event but it is already fully subscribed. More to follow …
Reader Comments (2)
It is not just depressing but absolutely terrifying to think we have evolved from a free country into a dictatorship. Without freedom, life is meaningless. Our children will grow up to be slaves with one purpose - to serve the state and report their friends, families and colleagues who are less than perfect healthy specimens. I just don't understand why fascism and state bullying have become so trendy.
I think the biggest problem is that we are being run by immature politicians who have allowed themselves to be manipulated by those who see life as being only worthy for people who agree with them and those who do not shape up to their ideal should be forced by law to change.
This is exactly the danger to societies caused when only one voice, one opinion, and one side of an issue is allowed to speak and anyone who disagrees, or has a different opinion, is silenced and ignored which is exactly what happened in the so called "public consultation" which was a cover up to pretend the anti smoker lobby groups are not in control of policy making.
I wonder when they will open the compulsory health camps to force dissenters to shape up or else. It surely cannot be too far ahead in the future.
I agree with Pat Nurse and her comment above, and what about our mental health, is this not part of our health as well, because people who are ordered about with the exchange of blackmail are not mentally healthy if their actions are not a result of their free will, so why is mental health disregarded to its exclusion from physical health since general health is both mental and physical, and those are the two components that make up our health.
Those freaks must realise and learn that health is composite, mental and physical, and the purpose of mental health or our psychology is not served by executing commands originating from elsewhere, in fact issuing commands to people is attacking their mental well-being and their psychological welfare and is attacking them as people and individuals and should not be allowed for others to do, and that means nobody.
People who want to smoke inside who refrain to do so, who exchange taxes instead of the production cost of 20 or 25 cigarettes, who feel like doing something new but are told it is not allowed for them to try on their own, are not healthy in general because of their mental health and the mentality of a slave that is inspired towards them. The mind should be healthy in a healthy body, the ancient Greeks used to say. If one of the two is not healthy then the person succumbs to his health.
This draft law should not meet any MP's approval, and it will be voted for by Labour communists who derive pleasure from eliminating others who have the habit of captivating their political opponents, by enslaving them not to be able to smoke on their own, in order to conquer their spirit and discipline to nothing and enslave somebody else. Society does not approve of what they do because it does not meet our consent of the majority, and what they decide on their own is not a social rule that has to be followed.
It is not punishable to smoke inside or buy cigarettes from an adult with legal responsibility or print decorations on product wrappers from a producer or manufacturer, so why should it become punishable because of the propostered will of one individual if it is not punishable by anybody else?
A fact is a fact and a fact should be respected in the right and the same way, not be made up by somebody's actions which are not facts themselves, who pervert reality with people's lack of actions under the exchange of blackmail. Fact has it that what they already currently punish by law enacting the exchange of blackmail is not a punishable event by anybody else in general who would have been its victims. It is only punished by the police on its own without being punished by any victim of what got punished, not exchanging the punishment with the consequence of a responsibility or anything else that would be guilty because it is innocent, and that is the real crime that is involved that violates the state constitution.
Because punishing innocent actions that underlie no guilt is enacted to the expense of the punished individual who is not at fault and is against him or her constituting a constitutional crime acted out by politicians, by MPs and by Rishi Sunak as well.
If this draft law gets approved by the majority of the parliament, despite the majority of the people, it should be challenged in court bringing up correctly targeted and consistent arguments, aiming at cancelling its validity and enforcement. The King should not sign it either, and I know that he would do so unawaringly.