Rishi Sunak's Smoking Ban is a Moralistic Smokescreen
Photo Credit to Simon Walker / 10 Downing Street
Rishi Sunak’s smoking ban, stating that nobody born after 2009 will be allowed to legally buy tobacco in the UK, has passed its first parliamentary hurdle. The ban appears grounded in a concern for liberty: the liberty of the people comes at the price of government involvement which takes responsibility for this liberty by a legislative ban. Comparing this narrative to Sunak’s current domestic and foreign policy nevertheless reveals an inconsistency in this justification.
‘Liberty and freedom’, and the responsibility of government legislature, appear to be the guiding conservative justifications for the ban. Health Secretary Victoria Atkins made precisely such an appeal to freedom when she claimed that “there is no liberty in addiction”. Sajid Javid similarly made use of the category of freedom, asking whether we can “honestly say that this drug enhances personal liberty and freedom?” The great conservative-libertarian Peter Hitchens himself even accused anyone opposing the ban in the name of liberty to be a fool.
‘Freedom’ is indeed a pressing question today. Since the Iranian missiles sent into Israel on 13 April and Israel’s retaliatory missile strikes on Iranian military sites five days later, military escalations in the Middle East echo the early developments of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel decimated Arab coalition offensives headed by Syria and Egypt. With 1.7 million people currently displaced in Gaza, this escalation will be even more detrimental to the Palestinian population until large-scale, collaborative diplomacy efforts are employed by Western governments. Sunak's policy towards Israel is in this sense soft and clearly ineffective judging by Netanyahu’s actions, undermining humanitarian aid sent to Gaza. Governments have a responsibility for the freedom of its people and of oppressed populations; civil freedom exists where a government makes it possible. Yet Sunak’s smoking ban removes attention from a much clearer crisis of freedom, not only by acting as a smokescreen for his lack of foreign policy, but by being contradicted by his oppressive domestic policy changes.
On the domestic front, civil freedom and government responsibility are clearly not guiding Sunak’s policy. Although we are unable to take responsibility when it comes to our smoking behaviour (hence the legislative ban), individual responsibility is crucial, and government responsibility can be diminished, for Sunak’s proposed benefits reform. It is time for sufferers of mental and physical disability to take responsibility and stop relying on government and taxpayer money, Sunak states, supposedly targeting “those who could work but choose not to”. As reported in a recent press release, responsibility is to fall on individuals. ‘Responsibility’ appears to be a conveniently malleable category for Sunak. People should 'take responsibility for their own lives' when it comes to benefits, yet responsibility falls on the government for smoking-related health choices.
If a concern for liberty grounded the smoking ban, then it was clearly a short-lived concern when turning from smoking to general public health. GPs will no longer be able to issue ‘fit notes’, meaning those struggling to work will need to seek specialists to qualify for benefits. With millions already currently waiting for NHS specialist treatment, the policy suggestion is understandably hailed as a catastrophe by UK health charities. The support of the mentally and physically disabled relies on steady and effective government subsidising, and yet precisely where the State should take responsibility, it displaces it onto its obscure notion of the disabled individual.
Disability Rights UK insists that the rise in mental illness is partially due to the government’s “appalling handling of Covid”, and the related cost-of-living crisis and failed economic policy. When faced with the declining freedom of a population needing disability-related financial support, Sunak reverses his narrative and tells citizens to be responsible for themselves.
Heavy taxation, government regulation, public health education as well as support for quitting means that smoking rates are already steadily declining. Judging by his contradictory domestic and foreign policy, liberty and freedom are far from being the priorities for Sunak’s party. Responsibility is conveniently shifted between State and individual when it suits him, insisting upon freedom whilst actively implementing its limitation.
The smoking ban is nothing more than a moralistic smoke screen for failed policy and a wish to ‘leave a mark’ in government. It is a policy which conveniently refuses to ask the question of why people choose to consume tobacco. It claims to be grounded in a concern for freedom, yet it is proposed alongside a series of restrictive, contradictory policies. Where we are concerned with liberty, the reasoning behind the ban should be criticised, with the contradictory reasoning behind Sunak’s accompanying domestic and foreign policy, in the name of this very liberty.