Another liberty disappears in a puff of smoke as the state takes control
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An hour into the smoking debate, I confessed to a colleague: “Listening to this makes me want to light up.”
“Never mind that,” he replied, “I’d be tempted to shoot up.” For there’s now’t more depressing than watching MPs – Left and nominally Right – compete to choke your liberties.
We were subject to emotional blackmail, spurious philosophy and university union rhetoric. “Smoking is not a free choice,” said the SNP’s Kirsten Oswald, “it is an addiction.” So, madam, are porn and Morris dancing, but we are yet to outlaw those. “Do you also want to ban salt and sugar?” mocked the libertarians. “Do you want to legalise heroin?” retorted the authoritarians.
As the thin edge of the straw man arguments grew thicker, Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, pleaded with us to move from the “tossing sea of theory” to the “firm ground of fact” and build “a brighter future for our children” by passing her progressive ban on smoking.
But though advocates for the Bill were admirably pro-child (as am I: they make such good workers), few MPs seemed to grasp that the ban will age with them, so that even a future 35-year-old won’t be able to smoke. What are they supposed to do after sex? Talk?
Why is a Conservative government proposing this claptrap? Because, implied Liz Truss, they are not Conservative. Rising to her feet in a magnificent red dress, the ex-PM laid into the “finger wagging, nannying control freaks” on her own benches, noting that the same “health police” that wished to save children from nicotine only five minutes ago favoured prescribing pills to block puberty.
This gets to the flabby heart of the matter: what’s legal and what’s not is a matter of elite taste. Today, the toffs are pro-sex change and anti-smoking; whereas 150 years ago, one could legally smoke opium with Queen Victoria but if I showed up at Buck Palace in a dress I’d get 10 years in Bedlam.
Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health boss, wittily exploited the divisions on the government side, calling Atkins “comrade”, accusing her of stealing his idea and adding that it proves “our dominance in the battle of ideas”.
Yes, but it also proves Liz’s point about the illiberal consensus. The Tories are simply the lighter option: vote Labour if you prefer your socialism unfiltered. Streeting declared that a crackdown on smoking would be “just the beginning” – he’s got his eye on you, chocolate and gin – and laughed at the news of a meeting of Conservatives that had been shut down by the police in Brussels on suspicion that they were in possession of dangerous opinions.
One fears that many Lefties would approve a progressive ban on proper Conservatives speaking in public, starting at 16 and rising to the point that the care home is silent but for the sound of Midsomer Murders.
Smoking is bad and should be discouraged, yet there is a thin line of liberty and it’s distressing to see many politicians march over it con brio.
They have wrecked our economy, mucked up foreign affairs and now push us to the brink of war. It’s rubbing salt into the wound to insist that there be no smoking in the nuclear fallout zone.
