With smoking, the Rubicon is now in the rear view mirror. It is less than a year since Rishi Sunak announced his plan to gradually prohibit the sale of tobacco. His successor, Keir Starmer, recently admitted that his government is considering some form of outdoor smoking ban. These developments are remarkable not just because they are illiberal but because they do not even pretend to respect freedom of choice. Until last year, anti-smoking campaigners would swear on a stack of Bibles that they were not prohibitionists. Their policies might have a negative impact on adults who choose to smoke but that was not, supposedly, the intention. For most of their campaigns it was children who were weaponised. Tobacco advertising had to be banned because it seduced children. Branding and shop displays had to be banned for the same reason. Taxes had to rise to make cigarettes unaffordable to children. Occasionally, they would claim to be acting on behalf of other groups of people — slim cigarettes had to be banned because they appealed to women, and smoking in pubs had to be banned to “protect” bar staff — but the activists still insisted that they were not infringing on adults’ right to smoke. Your cigarettes might be covered in disgusting photos but you could still buy them. You might not be able to smoke in a pub, but you could always nip outside. 

To put it in economic terms, they appealed to market failure and negative externalities. The arguments were disingenuous, but if you squinted enough you could squeeze them into a framework that was just about consistent with British liberalism.

Not any more. The justification for the latest diktats is distinctly more Iranian and can be summarised as “Smoking is bad for you, we don’t like it and we’re going to stop you doing it.” Asked about banning smoking outdoors, Starmer did not pretend that wisps of tobacco smoke in a beer garden were a serious or unavoidable threat to health. He did not attempt to drag The Children into it. Quite simply, he wants to ban smoking in beer gardens because it will make life harder for smokers. He said:

My starting point on this is to remind everybody that over 80,000 people lose their lives every year because of smoking.

To which we might respond with the thought that millions of people enjoy smoking and can make their own minds up about the risk.

That is a preventable death, it’s a huge burden on the NHS and, of course, it is a burden on the taxpayer.

Strictly speaking, death is not preventable. That may seem to be a pedantic quibble but it is highly relevant to his claim that smoking is a “burden” on taxpayers which is apparently now a justification for the government to use any form of coercion against people who smoke, up to and including prohibition.

According to George Eaton at the New Statesmen, Starmer genuinely believes that the state will save money if fewer people smoke. Eaton says that his focus on “prevention” in health stems from his belief that it is better to be tough on the causes of crime than to build more prisons. Whatever the merits of Starmer’s views on crime prevention, he is wrong about smoking. If you prevent someone from becoming a criminal, they won’t commit any crimes, but if you prevent someone from smoking, they will still get ill and die. They will just do it later, after being a “burden” on the NHS for longer and taking more money from the state pension pot.

It is possible that Starmer believes that bullying smokers will have an economic payoff because unreliable state-funded pressure groups keep saying it will. The most recent of these is Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) which claimed in May that the “cost of smoking” in England had risen by 25 per cent in just two years and has now reached £21.8 billion a year. This is £5 billion more than ASH reckoned smoking cost the country in 2022 and £10 billion more it estimated in 2019. Despite smoking rates continuing to decline, ASH are claiming that the cost of smoking has nearly doubled in just five years. 

I shall write about ASH’s ridiculous estimate in a future article. Suffice to say it is an insult to our intelligence that demeans us all. As I have explained before, economists have understood for decades that “the nonsmoking population as a whole is more expensive than the smoking population” and that “lifetime expenditure is higher for nonsmokers than for smokers because smokers’ higher annual utilisation rates are overcompensated for by nonsmokers’ higher life expectancy.” The massive decline in smoking rates since the 1960s has not reduced pressure on public services. On the contrary, it has increased health and welfare costs by contributing to the ageing population.

It is a simple fact that the prohibition of tobacco would require taxes to rise, partly to make up for the loss of tobacco revenue and partly to pay for the health and social care of old people who would otherwise — and there is no delicate way of putting this — be dead. But even if the economic arguments were less flimsy, why should people have their lifestyles regulated to the point of criminalisation for the benefit of a failing healthcare system that was designed when Joseph Stalin was alive? The founding principles of the NHS were that healthcare would be universal, free at the point of delivery and funded by taxation. There was no footnote saying that the public would have to live within certain constraints and give up their small pleasures, let alone that the state would use the full force of the law to bring about such behavioural change. If the government had said in 1948 that it would one day have to ban tobacco to protect the NHS, it would have been laughed out of office and yet today everything from taxes on sugary drinks to 20mph speed limits are justified on the basis that they will “protect the NHS”.

With more than six million people on NHS waiting lists, the scapegoating of smokers seems like nothing more than displacement activity. Under the Conservatives, regulation of behaviour became a substitute for good governance. Starmer promised a reset, insisting that he would “tread more lightly on your lives” and focus on economic growth, but Starmerism is already looking very much like Sunakism, more interested in regulating the price of Oasis tickets and stopping people smoking on the pavement than in addressing Britain’s structural problems. Does Starmer really believe the economic argument for tobacco prohibition and outdoor smoking bans or is he just using it to mask his pathological paternalism? Who knows? Whatever his thinking, it does not bode well for anyone who does not yearn for a risk-free life. The British state now feels entitled to throw anything at you, no matter how old you are, because it is for your own good.