Requiem for a cig The smoking ban is Cromwellian

Lighting up a Marlboro Red after a lovely tapas lunch at one of my favourite restaurants recently, at a pavement table in the shameless sunshine, feeling very pleased with the world, I was cross to read in my newspaper that Parliament had at last settled on a final draft of the legislation which seeks to prevent anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 from ever knowing the pleasures of a post-prandial fag. The legislation, which is due to receive royal assent this week, will make it illegal for shops to sell tobacco to anyone currently aged 17 or younger, thereby creating a “smoke-free generation”. It’s interesting how the expectations of generations have become so banal down the decades; from the Love Generation to the Smoke-Free generation, a cohort defined by an absence.

This strange plan — with a soupçon of science fiction about it, due to the odd device of the cut-off point, achieved by raising the legal smoking age by one year, every year — is a minor reminder that Rishi Sunak was ever prime minister. Our Glorious Leader Keir Starmer seems to have been with us for so long now — like a kind of political psoriasis — that it seems oddly time-warping to recall that it was only two years ago that the “loveless landslide” happened, making lady columnists feel “fruity” and their male counterparts deeply relieved that “the adults” were “back in the room”.

But before him, there was that nice Mr Sunak, who once admitted at the age of 21, in a 2001 television programme called Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, that he had no working-class friends: “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper-class, I have friends who are working-class…well, not working-class.” Though it’s cringey and shallow (would he dare to have transposed his bubble so openly from class to race?), one might applaud Sunak for simply speaking the truth; the classes are as savagely divided as they were in D.H. Lawrence’s day, probably more so due to the end of the grammar schools. Still, the patronising paternalism of the smoking Bill, the lack of regard for personal freedom and the perception of the uni-party as a bunch of busybodies who always know better than you what’s best for you, makes it clear for the nth time why we are looking at a landscape in which Reform could replace the Conservatives as the opposition.

Not since Churchill’s cigar has a smoking politician been so identified by his habit as Nigel Farage, who is believed to be a 20-a-day man, even when in the I’m A Celebrity jungle. His man-of-the-people shtick — despite his expensive education and considerable wealth — has been established by the image of him at ease with a pint in one hand and a fag in the other; the pull of hedonism is a great leveller. He called Sunak’s plan “pious grandstanding”; last year, during the Tobacco and Vapes Bill’s report stage, he made a brilliant speech in the Commons: “I have to say, I find the tone of moral superiority in the chamber this afternoon almost unbearable… You clearly believe you are better human beings than those outside of here who choose to pursue activities that you perhaps would not. Well, it’s a bit of a shock, I suppose, to some of you, but there are some of us that like a smoke. We even go for a few pints at the pub. We have a punt on the horses. I even attempt to have the odd doughnut… Because we want to have fun. We want to make our own minds up. You can educate. You can tell us. You can give us the facts. But the idea that this place should make those decisions for other people shows me that the spirit of Oliver Cromwell is alive and well.”

Farage may be pushing it a bit when he heralds smokers as the “heroes of the nation” due to the huge taxes they contribute now that a packet of fags is pushing 20 quid. But he has a point: over 80% of the cost of a packet is tax, meaning that tobacco duty and VAT on smokeables bung the Exchequer around £8 billion a year whereas treating smoking-related illnesses is thought to cost the NHS around £2 billion. Then there’s the brisk “Net Saver” argument, which posits that as smokers often die younger, they save a vast amount of public money which might be spent on we oldsters, including our pensions and care homes.

Farage has it right when he leans into the pub as an important liberty bellwether. It’s telling to compare the delighted reaction of drinkers when Farage walks into a pub with the loathing felt towards Labour politicians, which became so extreme last winter that 250 pubs banned them. 

Looking back, the indoor smoking ban of 2007, under the Blair/Brown government, was the start of the current existential trouble which pubs find themselves in: one a day closes permanently now. That the government finally understands that it has pushed the hospitality industry too far was indicated by the fact that they pulled back from the proposed ban on smoking in pub gardens in 2024 — but it’s too late now. It’s poignant to recall that the name “public house” came about at a time when many actual houses where the poor lived were barren; the pubs ensured that the working classes had somewhere warm and welcoming to go to. Now that homes once more risk being dark and cold when the summer’s gone, many people will have to walk further to find a friendly light.

Does prohibition ever work? The tobacco black market is already huge. Christopher Snowdon, an economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said of Sunak’s strange legacy: “You’re going to have a fairly large, informal market of smokers who are old enough to buy cigarettes selling cigarettes to people who are not old enough. The problem with prohibition isn’t that it doesn’t have any effect whatsoever on consumption — the problem with prohibition is it leads to massive black markets and a lot of tax revenues gone.” So in its crazed compulsion to control the personal behaviour of its citizens, the government will make itself far poorer — but bossiness is its own reward, if you’re that way inclined. 

Already, plenty of vaping shops sell contraband foreign fags on the cheap. The one nearest me sells “illicit whites”, literally from under the counter; manufactured in the UAE and China, they are around half the price of legal smokes. They taste like they’ve been produced by the government to put people off smoking, but they sell like hotcakes. They even have the mandatory gory health-warning pics on them, to make them look legal. Surely the kids will end up buying these — or else take up vaping. A primary school teacher I know says it’s not unusual for nine-year-olds to be enthusiastic and habitual vapers. It sounds like vapes have caused more problems than they’ve solved.

Why doesn’t the government treat the alcohol industry with similar ruthlessness? More than 10,000 people a year in the UK die from alcohol-specific causes. Alcohol abuse costs the NHS £4.9 billion, enough to pay the salaries of almost half the nurses in England; it costs the state £27 billion through everything from lost productivity to violent crime. So why not put photographs of beaten-up women on cans of strong beer? Or mangled cars on premium spirits? No one ever took a life because they had one too many fags.

I realise that I’m not a typical smoker. A pack will last me a week — and that’s shared with my husband. It would never occur to me to get the gaspers out at home; I only ever fancy one after a nice lunch out. I daresay I’m ignoring the science. But there are odd glitches in the modern mentality which insists that smoking is a social evil beyond all others. The Green Party plans to legalise crack cocaine while agreeing with the paternalistic attitude of the mainstream parties towards phasing out smoking. Last week, a report was released suggesting counterintuitively that young non-smokers who eat lots of fruit and vegetables may be more likely to develop lung cancer. “Have your 5 a day — and pass away!” was a public health message we never predicted. In 2023, the World Health Organisation claimed that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; yes, smoking can kill, but the urge to make friends over a cheeky fag in the freezing cold is a life-enhancing one.

Maybe I’m swayed by my own peculiar olfactory tastes. One of the dumbest lines about smoking — so dumb that anyone who utters it immediately identifies themselves as a half-wit — is “It would be like kissing an ashtray!” Personally, I find the scent of fresh smoking attractive, like fresh sweat, though of course nothing is nice when it’s stale. Many perfumes use tobacco as a “note” —Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille is particularly lush. 

My first remembered smell is that of my father, who had smoked 30 un-tipped Woodbines a day since he was a kid. He died of mesothelioma, which he contracted as a teenage boy working on the building of one of the proliferation of NHS hospitals after the war; of damage caused by tobacco, there was no trace. As with so many health-related issues, so much of it really is the — excuse the pun — luck of the draw.

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