Anti-Smoking Laws | PM could introduce some of the world’s toughest measures against smokers

Buying cigarettes will become illegal for the next generation in New Zealand. The island nation becomes the first country to pass legislation on it.

Anti-Smoking Laws | PM could introduce some of the world’s toughest measures against smokers

Do we want to be like Isis or Bhutan? They both tried banning tobacco and guess what happened? They ended up backtracking pretty quickly. Bhutan ended their ban in 2020. Believe it or not, tobacco smugglers were bringing covert into the country. Now it looks like Rishi Sunak is pondering doing something similar. Well, not an all-out ban. He’s not planning on cigarette sales, but a ban that would essentially stop young people from ever buying cigarettes. They cunningly do this by steadily increasing the legal age for buying cigs year after year. Now, this is what has been done in New Zealand, one of the more authoritarian, so-called liberal democracies in the world. They’ve done this, so if the government decided to do it (and it’s something that Labour’s Wes Streeting has also expressed support for), you could actually have a situation in which someone who is 41 could go out and buy a pack of but his 40-year-old mate would be turned away.

Now, one MP is reported to have said, ‘You’re going to end up with newly elected MPs surreptitiously asking Michael Gove if he’ll buy cigarettes for them at the local Tesco’s.’ Just bizarre. It is bizarre, particularly considering Michael Gove is reportedly in favor of this move, despite the fact he took his own smoking breaks in a special hut built for him on the roof of his departmental office. Again, it’s do as I say, not as I do.

Now, we all know smoking is a killer. No one denies that. But this is a truly unworkable policy. Well, there you go. Absolutely. I mean, who disagrees that you need a cigarette after that? I do actually prefer a little vape every now and again. Well, it’ll be after that before long, though, Emily. That’s the thing. Let’s go after Patrick. You like a cigarette every now and then. Sorry about you. I smoke. I know it’s bad for me, okay? Everybody knows that. It’s bad for them, okay? But it’s up to me whether or not I want to do that, right? And we will have a farcical situation where, like you just said there, you know, we’re going to end up with a 45-year-old walking into an office desperately trying to buy a packet of Camel Blues, being turned down. Hey, where from?

Just from a purely political point on this, where are the votes in this? Yeah, where are the votes for Rishi Sunak in doing this? No one’s going to go out and vote Tory in the next general election because their next-door neighbor might be banned from smoking. But there’s a guy called Javad Khan who was the CEO of Bernardo’s, the charity, right? And he came up with all these proposals that the government is now considering. He wanted to ban people in social housing in council homes from smoking on their own property, in their own homes. I mean, this stuff is extremely interventionist, isn’t it?

Look, I get it, and I worry about the nanny state too. But we do ban things in this country, like, you know, we have guns banned, drugs are banned. Um, you know, it’s fine to have certain bad things, and smoking is a killer. Like you, I think it’s 74,000 a year, and then you’ve got the like 8,000 people that die from smoking. I don’t accept that me having a isn’t gonna shoot someone, is it? Right, my having a cigarette isn’t gone; he’s still a killer.

Well, on the kid’s point, I am someone who never thought that I would get addicted to cigarettes. I had my first cigarette at 19 and then was hooked and tried to quit for like 10 years. So I actually do think the whole never having a cigarette is the best way to prevent it. It’s not good; I get it can take the stress off. It feels like that, but I actually think the best method for getting rid of this is never to try.

Hang on, Lewis. I think we have a graphic that I can put up on the screen. It’s a graph that basically shows that young people are smoking less and less and less and less and less. Do we really need to ban it anyway, Ben? Well, it’s making less because now they’re vaping, yeah. But that’s so much better for your health than this. I must admit I smoked as a kid AC 19-20 maybe until I was 25. I’ve just got back from Vegas where, before that, I wasn’t a smoker. I wasn’t a vaper, but at the tables, you can smoke and vape indoors, and get plied with drinks all night. You don’t need to get up; you don’t need to leave the tables. I’ve smoked a vape now and then at the tables, and I’ve come back and started vaping again.

My thoughts on the ban on smoking are I don’t want a nanny state or a big-state government coming in and creeping into our lives any more than we’ve got now. And I think, in actual fact, the best method is using that money to stop a smoking ban to get people fit, get them lean, get them strong, and naturally, people will stop smoking after that because they’ll see the effect it has on their health. If you’re fit, and you’re training, and you’re smoking, and you go on the treadmill the next day, you can see what effect it has. There is an argument that you’ve paid for it, and your health care is intact. But sorry to interrupt you; there’s our graphic which shows what you can see there across all age ranges: smoking is just going down and down and down and down.

Imagine the flat line if we just… Yeah, but I think they’re just, you know, don’t lie to me. Sorry, but again, lie to me and say, ‘Oh, we need to do this to take the pressure off the NHS,’ while you simultaneously pumping millions of people into a country. You’re doing also; you’re not building infrastructure; you’re not employing enough doctors and nurses; you’re not doing all of that. I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t be banning people from doing this because the next thing it’ll be, you know, you’re only allowed allotted amounts of chocolate or fatty foods. Yeah, this is the next thing.

Is there not an element of sort of sneer and contempt for working-class people who may, dare I say, enjoy the odd glass of wine with a cigarette in their hand to think, ‘Oh, okay, I’m gonna relax, wind down from a hard day at work.’ What’s so bad about that? And as Patrick says, they’re paying an enormous amount of tax, and all this is going to do if you ban it enables the black market. But I think if you ask most smokers, they’re saying, ‘I’m trying to quit; I know it’s bad for me; I want to quit.’ Yeah, I think that about fatty food, but guess what? I still shove a donut down my hole once or twice on any given day.

It’s just so annoying because I think this is what gets me the most. People like Michael Gove, who likes to smoke, oh, he likes to party as well, and if I’ll be here, he’d say, ‘Oh, it’s a great idea,’ even though we know he likes a cheeky cigarette. Sorry, I’ll be so, you know, it’s just so much do as I say, not as I do, which just drives me mad. And they listen to the public health lobby far too much. The public health lobby, if we took all of their recommendations on board, we would not be allowed to eat anything that contains sugar; we’d not be able to eat anything that contains salt; we’d not be allowed to do anything. Well, exactly. We cease to exist, right? We cease to have agency over our own lives.

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