More than 35 years ago, I recall when an old friend of mine (who died all too young in 2006), Chris R Tame, had been appointed the director of an outfit called FOREST. That acronym stood for Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco. The group was backed by sundry folk, including as far as I know, tobacco firms. It made no secret of it. Chris, much to the annoyance of various pressure groups such as ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), was a keep-fit guy, who went jogging (I joined him in runs around Regent’s Park), lifted weights, did not smoke, and drank in moderation.
Chris’s argument was that your life was yours, not the nation’s or the State’s. With so-called “passive smoking” and the “pollution” side of it, he argued that the risk was slight, but where possible, the issue was for owners of private property to decide. A person was not, on this reasoning, forced to work in a pub or restaurant, etc, and people were not forced to go to such places. In a vigorous economy, with lots of consumer choice, there would be non-smoking premises and those who disliked or feared tobacco smoke could patronise places they preferred. It was the sort of messy solution that a market would provide, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. (See a commentary here from the CATO think tank in the US.)
Over the past 30 years, Chris’s argument has lost ground. On a personal level, as someone who doesn’t smoke or like the smell of it, that’s fine by me. But I realise that this is short-sighted to value a loss of others’ liberties. It is nevertheless striking that, when considering how things were 30 or 40 years ago, we have gone from tolerance of smoking (look at old movies and TV shows) to almost total suppression. I still see a few people smoking a ciggie outside an office here in London, but that’s rare. In fact, I am more likely to smell weed than tobacco these days in London, or for that matter, New York.
Today, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, at the annual Conservative Party conference, outlined a few policies and measures. I was struck by how he wants to adopt a New Zealand-style measure to progressively raise the age at which people can buy cigarettes, up to the point where it is illegal in all but name.
I recall many years ago how ASH and others denied to Chris Tame’s face that they wanted to ban cigarettes. Oh no, they said, that’s just propaganda. Well, it turns out that the end-point for all their campaigns was indeed to ban cigarettes completely. They wanted it all along but lacked the cojones to say so honestly.
I remember Chris Tame through his bookshop in Covent Garden, right down the street from a restaurant where I had washed dishes for a while when I was a student. I was not aware that he had passed on, I am sorry to hear it. He was a smart and funny man.
llater,
llamas
Well, at least the UK is not so irredeemably corrupt as to be trying to restrict vaping rather than cigarettes to preserve government revenues from the tobacco settlements.
“The UK moves closer to a total tobacco ban”
Good. The sooner the better, then BAT can move its domicile from London to the IoM ( is there a Chinese offshore tax haven? ). And stockholders can be free from the quarterly sermon on equity equality and ESG from the Chairman’s pulpit.
Stockholders can look forward to increased dividends, and leave the UK to sink further into the mire of governmental incompetence, societal degeneration that it so richly deserves.
Maybe the boat people will save that shithole*.
* Thanks Donald.
There’s a simple reason why such a ban may work in New Zealand but won’t in the United Kingdom.
New Zealand is a market of around 5 million people, about 2,500 miles from the nearest continental land mass with different laws.
The UK is a market of around 65 million people, a mere 20 miles from the nearest continental land mass with different laws.
If you were going into the tobacco-smuggling market, which would you opt for? The UK is both a far easier and far juicier market for the smugglers to bring in stuff to sell on the (ahem!) ‘informal’ economy. (There’s a reason there aren’t any inflatable dinghies overloaded with “desperate refugees in fear of their lives” making the 2,500 mile trip across the Tasman Sea from Australia to New Zealand).
You can easily buy untaxed cigarettes in Delta Junction, Alaska – or so my smoking co-workers told me when we were there. This is at least 168x harder to get to than a 20-mile hop across the Channel. Plus, there’s no US land route, so US cigarettes were being smuggled through Canada, across two international borders – yet it appears that the game was still well-worth the candle.
US studies suggest that a price differential of as little as $2 a pack is enough to make large-scale long-distance cigarette smuggling a very lucrative endeavour. Places like New York and Chicago, which have very high city taxes, are just awash in smuggled cigarettes. Imagine the opportunities for profit when the product is made illegal . . . Gee, when did we try that before?
Ban tobacco in the UK, and you will simply divert uncountable millions in untaxed moneys into the pockets of criminals, while cigarette smoking will barely decline at all – in fact, I’d take a small wager that the smuggled product will be cheaper after the ban than the legal product was before. It’s such a monumentally stupid idea, I can’t imagine for a minute that the government won’t eagerly embrace it.
llater,
llamas
When people tell me “if people like you vote Reform, that will just let Labour win”… because of stuff like this I say “So what?”
Tories need to burn to ash, then maybe 10 years now we’ll have enough people who can try & rebuild whatever is left.
Llamas, this is the case already. Cigarettes smuggled in from Eastern Europe already undercut their British counterpart and are so prevalent that they distort the government’s own figures on the percentage of the populous that still smoke.
@ WndyPants – I did not know that. Thank you for sharing.
This only reflects the experience in Chicago, where a combination of a $3-per-pack city tax and an unhindered freeway drive of less than an hour to Indiana, where cigarettes are $5 or more a pack less than in the city, produces the same result. Billboards on I80 tout the difference to retail customers. You’d have to be a congenital idiot – or an elected politician – not to see the inevitable outcome.
llater,
llamas
Actually, it’s because NZ has a free vaping market. So the cigarette users will almost all move to cheaper, healthier vapes. In fact the people affected by the law — the young — already barely smoke, so there isn’t the outcry.
The UK is trying to ban smoking without providing the obvious alternative. That’s why smuggling will be rife, as it is in Australia, where vaping is barely allowed.
Australia had a massive problem with their “boat people”. But their politicians bit the bullet and started stranding them off-shore, in pretty terrible accommodation, barely letting any in. The flood dropped to a trickle. Every now and again some well-intended complaints are made about the horrible way Australia treats refugees (they leave out the “illegal” bit). But the policy is a massive vote winner, so it stays.
The UK could do the same. The Rwanda scheme would be a massive winner for the Tories and Labour if they had the balls to do it.
Does anyone else think that Rishi Sunak looks like a school prefect? He even has the slightly ill fitting suit of a teenager who has outgrown it, but still has to wear it, at least until the end of term.
His two main policies in his speech were to progressively ban smoking, and to reform A Levels. These are topics which might be of interest to an 18 year old, but not to a man who leads the allegedly Conservative Party.
His only hope of avoiding a complete wipe out in the next general election is that Sir Keir Starmer is so epically useless. Sunak does not have a clue.
I have already commented this on another thread.
So there is need to repeat my comments, on this mad scheme, on this thread.
I am reminded of a person who supported the closure of restaurants and then paid people to eat out in restaurants “eat out to help out” – money spent on top of the vast sums of money money spent to stay home and not work (“furlough”), and the many billions of Pounds spent on utterly failed schemes such as “track and trace”.
There seems to be some sort of order out there to forget everything that was done during Covid, or to LIE about it – as with the presenter or GB News today who pretended that only a tiny number of people had an “adverse reaction” to the Covid “vaccines” (silencing a guest who dared mention the injured and killed – that guest will not be on again at “the home of Free Speech”).
We should not forget and we should not forgive. The 400 hundred Billion Pounds spent, supported by all political parties, has crippled this country, and the medical policies, again supported by all political parties, of smearing effective Early Treatments and, instead, pushing toxic injections – were terrible.
As for the “inquiry” it is a farce – which will most likely say the insane “lockdowns” should have been even earlier and more extreme and that there should have been even more useless masks. The “inquiry” will, I predict, ignore how effective Early Treatments were smeared (Early Treatments that could have saved so many lives) and will ignore the injuries and deaths caused by the injections.
The inquiry will mirror what the despicable “mainstream media” have been for years – and what, tragically, GB News has become – now that most of the people with courage have been dismissed from it, G.B. news has, sadly, become “controlled opposition”.
“There is still Neil Oliver” – yes, but for how long?
It’s actually really rather amusing is a macabre sort of way. The government which just spent £billions over 21/22/23 encouraging citizens to poison themselves in a manner that might lead to a rich variety of innovative and unusual modes of death ( and still is so encouraging ). Now, in a risible attempt to demonstrate concern for the health and wellbeing of the individual citizen, wants to ban an individual from imbibing a ‘poison’ that might over a number of years promote that citizens own demise.
I guess its just another activity our new fascist overlords have abrogated to themselves, nowadays, you don’t even have a say in the mode of your own death. Another step toward the nationalization of the death industry. Wasn’t Hitler among the first to ban smoking ? No surprise there then.
Suppose they do shutdown the tobacco industry, I imagine they’ll just rebrand Big Tobacco and bring it under the wing of Big Pharma, since if a product originates there, it doesn’t matter to the politicians, since the bribes from that quarter are far superior.
Off topic: Could any one see any circumstance where you’d get £1,500 of value from Mat Hancock’s hour ? Unless you very badly wanted something really fucked up, then, then I suppose you might, even them, I might choose Boris Johnson in preference, just because of his superior skills at fucking everything he touches.
APL – interesting points, but it is worse in some other countries.
For example, in the United Kingdom the Covid injections have been quietly dropped apart for the over 65 (by the way, a total coincidence, there is severe problem with paying pensions and providing health care, and so on, for the over 65s), but in the United States, Canada, and some other places – the toxins are still being pushed on young people, even children.
As for politicians – in many Western countries, elected politicians have little power over the government machine.
I don’t think that is correct. I believe the UK government has retained Moderna, ( only one product that it couldn’t sell until the scamdemic ) to produce the annual influenza vaccine. What’s the betting it’s just the same COVID vaccine dressed up as an influenza vaccine ?
Otherwise, the British government must have abandoned any safety and testing regime for new medicines. Basically turning the UK into a huge laboratory.
It’s also interesting that while that repulsive horse faced harridan was forcing people to get ‘vaccinated’, selected officials were exempt! Nice!
And by the way, she seems to have left government and joined the WEF as an ‘advisor’.
It’s not that they have little power, its that they are by and large, thick as the residual product of the digestive process.
You said in your post:
“I recall many years ago how ASH and others denied to Chris Tame’s face that they wanted to ban cigarettes. Oh no, they said, that’s just propaganda. Well, it turns out that the end-point for all their campaigns was indeed to ban cigarettes completely. They wanted it all along but lacked the cojones to say so honestly.”
I don’t believe that this is the case. It appears that the anti-smoking crowd are borrowing from the US’s anti-gun crowd in that they deliberately conceal their ultimate goal. They do this by first implementing small steps (banning smoking in public buildings/schools/etc.), and then take incrementally larger steps. Here in the US the attempt is to ban “evil-looking” firearms, with the ultimate goal of eliminating citizen ownership of firearms entirely. They deny right to our faces that they want to eliminate firearms, and then take actions that attempt to do exactly that without saying it.
They are collectivist, statist, authoritarians, and are simply evil.