The week’s least surprising news was that our new Labour government will be picking up Rishi Sunak’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill where he left off. When it comes to tobacco prohibition, as with so many other misguided, virtue-signalling policies — banning “junk food” advertising, creating a football regulator, banning “no fault evictions”, forcing bouncers to undergo anti-terrorism training — you cannot slide a cigarette paper between the two parties. Cigarette papers will also be banned, by the way, because the Labour Party has not taken its policy from the New Zealand Labour Party whose legislation (since repealed) only included cigarettes, but has copied and pasted Rishi Sunak’s “everything but the kitchen sink” legislation which includes Rizla, heated tobacco, cigars, shisha, snuff, pipes (not just pipe tobacco but actual pipes) and “anything intended to be used for encasing tobacco products or herbal smoking products”.

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of the state-funded prohibitionist pressure group Action on Smoking and Health, was cock-a-hoop. “Today’s announcement puts us in pole position to be the first country in the world to end smoking”, she said. But does it? Even if you believe that prohibition works (spoiler: it doesn’t) is Britain really on track to be the first country to end smoking?

The Swedes might have something to say about that. In Sweden, the smoking rate is 5 per cent whereas in Britain it is 13 per cent. According to the preposterous impact assessment that was cobbled together by the Department of Health to justify Sunak’s prohibition, the UK’s smoking rate will start approaching zero at some point in the 2080s if the generational ban is introduced. It seems reasonable to assume that the Swedes will get there first.

Sweden has not banned tobacco, nor does it have any plans to do so. On the contrary, in November it will be cutting the tax on snus, Sweden’s most popular tobacco product, by 20 per cent. This will encourage more smokers to switch to it and that is how it achieved the lowest smoking rate in Europe in the first place.

If you are truly interested in creating a “smokefree” society, there are some obvious lessons from Sweden. Rather than delude ourselves about the entire population becoming abstinent from nicotine at some point in the distant future, we should encourage smokers to switch to much safer alternatives and not start panicking when a few nonsmokers start using those products too. Snus is not legal in Britain — scoring an incredible own goal, the EU banned it in 1992 (Sweden got an exemption) — but other reduced-risk products are, notably e-cigarettes, nicotine pouches and heated tobacco. It is thanks to such products that erstwhile inveterate smokers like me have not smoked in years. It is also why a lot of young people who would have become smokers have never actually smoked.

Alas, Starmer, like Sunak, believes in making the perfect the enemy of the good and intends to clamp down on those products too. The King’s speech promised to create new laws for “vapes and other consumer nicotine products (such as nicotine pouches)”. The government specifically says that it wants to stop nicotine pouches being “branded and advertised to appeal to children”. Remarkably, it does not say anything about banning their sale to children (which is still legal). As I said last month, a moral panic about pouches is brewing and yet neither Sunak nor Starmer has proposed the basic legislation, such as banning underage sales and capping nicotine levels, that would prevent it from happening. Nicotine pouches do not particularly appeal to children but there is nothing stopping an unscrupulous company entering the market with an ultra-high strength product.

Instead of setting these basic rules and enforcing them, Labour wants to regulate flavours and branding, and may even be planning to tax vapes (another Sunak ruse). We know from other countries that such policies lead to more smoking and more cigarettes being sold. As mentioned above, the government also intends to include a wide range of reduced-risk tobacco products, including heated tobacco, in the generational ban.

The two parts of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill are therefore pulling in opposite directions. From one side, you have the clumsy hand of the state using a weird and sluggish version of prohibition to coerce people away from all tobacco products. From the other side, you have restrictions on vapes, pouches and other reduced-risk products which, if allowed to flourish, would make smoking obsolete long before 2080. It is possible that the government might still get the balance right — the King’s speech was short on detail — but until it does, I’m backing Sweden.