The news today is full of stories that laud the proposal in the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to ban disposable vapes. The first link takes you to a Guardian report, the second to an almost identical BBC report that says,
“Disposable vapes are difficult to recycle and typically end up landfill, where their batteries can leak harmful waste like battery acid, lithium, and mercury into the environment, the government said.
Batteries thrown into household waste also cause hundreds of fires in bin lorries and waste-processing centres every year.”
I am glad that the BBC has discovered that lithium-ion batteries can cause fires, but I think their focus on the tiny little batteries in disposable vapes might be missing a bigger problem. A report on the British Safety Council website says that,
“Batteries that power electric vehicles such as e-bikes, e-scooters and electric cars were responsible for almost three fires a day across the UK last year, according to data collected by [Business Insurer] QBE from freedom of information requests sent to UK fire services.”
After quoting the Circular Economy Minister (did you know we had one of those?) about how disposable vapes need to be banned to discourage “this nation’s throwaway culture”, the BBC finally gets round to talking about the original reasons that prompted Rishi Sunak’s government to table this legislation and Sir Keir Starmer’s government to continue with it:
“It is already illegal to sell any vape to anyone under 18, but disposable vapes – often sold in smaller, more colourful packaging than refillable ones – are a “key driver behind the alarming rise in youth vaping”, the previous government said when it first set out its plan.
The number of people who vape without ever having smoked has also increased considerably over recent years, driven mostly by young adults.
Vaping is substantially less harmful than smoking, but it has not been around for long enough for its long-term risks to be known, according to the NHS.”
So, vaping is certainly less harmful than smoking, but it might not be completely harmless. The reason I am confident that it is largely harmless is that vaping has, in fact, been around for twenty years at least, and if they had solid evidence of harm they would have told us faster than an e-bike explodes. Personally, I think people have the right to make their own judgement of risk against pleasure in their own lives, and hence should be allowed to buy e-bikes, disposable vapes, non-disposable vapes, and tobacco.
The Sunak/Starmer government disagrees. The long title of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, as stated on the Parliamentary website, is “A Bill to Make provision about the supply of tobacco, vapes and other products, including provision prohibiting the sale of tobacco to people born on or after 1 January 2009; and to enable product requirements to be imposed in connection with tobacco, vapes and other products.”
The British law is modelled after a similar age-discriminatory tobacco prohibition law passed in New Zealand in 2022 when Jacinda Ardern was prime minister: “New Zealand passes legislation banning cigarettes for future generations.” It was reversed by Christopher Luxon’s government. We should be so lucky.
There is no constancy – attacks on “vapes”, but no attacks on battery driven cars and scooters that pose a far greater hazard. If “vapes” pose any hazard at all – which has not been shown. If the principle is “it might cause some unknown harm” then everything would be banned – as anything at all might produce some unknown harm.
Also it is wrong to kill endangered birds – unless they are killed by wind turbines, in which care it is supposedly fine to chop up birds.
Batteries are not new – they were around in the 19th century. Wind turbines and solar cells are not new either – if they were the way to go for energy production we would have gone down that road many decades ago.
“But C02” – China and other nations produce more and more C02 and the “international community” (i.e. would-be world “governance” types) clearly could not care less how much C02 China and other nations produce, yet they attack Western industry and energy with fanatical passion.
As there is only one atmosphere it makes no difference (from a “Climate Science” point of view) it makes no difference if C02 is produced in China and India – or in the United Kingdom and the United States, yet the world governance crowd are fanatically against the latter, and do not care at all about the former.
So whatever this is really all about it is NOT about reducing world C02 emissions.
Presumably the problem with vapes is that they are costing the government tobacco duty?
It’s all just part of the nanny state’s ongoing war against enjoyment.
Tobacco is one of those rare commodities where we have entirely socialised the costs, from butts in the street to cancer in the lungs. Shut it off.
Will they be banning single-use matches next?
Paul,
What it’s about is “looking good”. If you off-shore stuff to China you can claim to have solved a problem even if you’ve just moved it. I would force the Greens (and their allies) to watch films of the beyond Dickensian situation of kids digging rare earth metals in Africa or the conditions in the Chinese factories (the ones that have prison-style suicide nets). The arithmetic is all nonsense. The smarter Greens probably know this. The idiotic rest neither know nor care. How many people who bought an electric car recently even thought to consider the CO2 emissions of making it? You have to drive a car a very long way before the “capital emissions” are overtaken by the “use emissions”. Same for lots of things. By any reasonable “Green” metric ripping out a newish, efficient gas boiler and replacing it with a heat-pump is thermodynamically bollocks. Western “Green” thinking is a delusion on a grand scale. By “grand” I mean total. Wannabe hippie idiots like it because it feeds their self-righteous cravings, governments like it because it makes them look good and companies like it because they are conspiring with governments to skew the market towards their “Green” product via tax-breaks, incentives, relaxations in planning rules (how much easier is it to get permission to build a wind farm than a nuke station?).
I live in a Grade II listed building in a conservation area (next to, note “next to” not “in” a National Park. Replacing windows here has proven a nightmare because of planning regs. Specifically we are banned from having normal double-glazing* which would reduce our heating needs because of this. I have actually been told that if I fit the wrong windows I could go to jail. Seriously. Oddly enough reading that email from the council (Tory BTW) made me want to do things that probably do deserve jail time. Things involving duct-tape and a sandwich toaster: “The smell of a planning officer’s toasting scrotum is the smell of victory”.
It’s all vile bollocks concocted by petty-minded gits that make Arnold Judas Rimmer look happy-go-lucky.
*Shall I tell you what the problem with double-glazing is? Apparently, standard-gapped double-glazing reflects light differently so we have to have very expensive custom narrow-gap. I live on a road that looks, in terms of pot-holes, like a back alley in Mogadishu. The council has done fuck-all about this but is prepared to jail me over whether the “quality” of light reflected from my windows is or isn’t appropriate for a C18th building. And that is the nub of it. I’d been looking at wood-framed custom windows because they would kill me for fitting uPVC. Well, not exactly kill me, directly. They’d use The Filth for that. If you want the TL:DR on this I hate “Green” and believe them to be worse than Hitler. And quite frankly I’d love to see a certain Scandy tween sent to join the Hamas Joy Division. Yes, I am upset.
Do people really put lithium batteries in disposable vapes? I would think that’s too expensive.
george m weinberg,
According to this vaping store, yes they do.
I was a bit surprised, too. Battery technology is a fast-moving field, so I suppose my understanding of battery types was a few years out of date.
X Trapnel writes, “Is it the landfill batteries, or the enjoyment of something others don’t like, or the enjoyment of things which might be harmful, or the potential for it to be a gateway drug into something else, which they seek to prevent? Seems like they’re all in on all of those reasons, and whatever else you’ve got.”
Indeed. As you say, they just don’t like vapers, but they do like banning things. Hence the title of my post. The day will never come when prohibitionists announce that their work is done.
“jgh” asked, “Will they be banning single-use matches next?” Probably not next, but eventually, when they have worked through a few other things, they’ll get to them.
Your analogy with adultery is a good one, and I do not only say that because I have made similar analogies myself.
Of course there are parts of the world where adultery is illegal, and I sometimes gloomily think that far from being a dying relic of the past, that situation may be the wave of the future.
OK, a comment by “X Trapnel” to which I replied seems to have disappeared. I do not understand what has happened.
With hindsight it does seem depressingly inevitable that this government should pick up one of the worst proposals of the last one and run with it enthusiastically.
@Staghounds: Except for the fact the 9 to 10 billion quid a year taken in tobacco duty and the additional 2 billion quid in VAT charged on that duty is paid by smokers and more than covers those costs.
I live next to a piece of land registered as a public common. I don’t personally have a boundary with the common because I have a boundary with a public highway, but essentially the common is “over the road”. Along a large part of one side of the common is a church, who take their responsibilities seriously. For the last few years each autumn they’ve had contractors come and clear out the ditch along their boundary with the common, dumping the spoil on the common side (essentially dredging the ditch and maintaining the level of the common where it meets this ditch). This is generally very beneficial to the local area as it has reduced local surface flooding considerably, I wish the county council who own the common freehold were as conscientious. Anyway, this dredging reveals a large amount of rubbish that has accumulated in the ditch. I walk my dog over the common along this boundary, and was looking at the rubbish in this spoil – the usual collection of soft drinks cans and bottles but also a very large number of disposable vapes. Over about a hundred yards I stopped counting at 100 vapes.
I don’t like banning stuff, but we can’t ignore the consequences of disposable items. An alternative policy could be a deposit return scheme to recover the recyclable elements. Something does need to be done though about these disposable items.
Pointing at EV car batteries is just whataboutery. No-one is chucking an EV battery in the rubbish bin (EV batteries are relatively easily recycled and valuable), and I doubt many are being thrown into ditches and verges. Vapes are, as are drinks cans and bottles.
NickM – I agree with what you say on various matters.
As for the Planning Law point – I once had a case where a family were not allowed to change their windows to frames that would not rot because Planning Offices said it was a “Conservation Area”. I pointed out that the houses, indeed the whole village, was new – indeed “I own shirts older than the whole village”. And was able to allow the family to have the windows they wanted.
This was one of my very few victories in my many years as an elected councilor.
By the war – kudos to the government of New Zealand for repealing an insane law.
It is very difficult to repeal an insane law once it has gone on the books – officials and “experts” love insane laws, the more insane the more they love them, and try endless tricks (and lying “advice”) to prevent elected politicians repealing insane laws.
As the late Lord Harris (who, with Anthony Seldom ran the IEA before it became the waste-of-space it is today) used to say – our job is not pass regulations and statutes, but rather to repeal them.
Hence his “Repeal Group” in the House of Lords.
I find myself becoming oddly emotional with old memories (I can see and hear Lord Harris in my mind) – I am becoming a silly old man.