During the campaign for plain packaging a decade ago, anti-smoking campaigners cited the statistic that 570 children start smoking every day. “With such a large number of youngsters starting to smoke every year”, said a spokesperson for Cancer Research UK in 2013, “urgent action is needed”.
Last week saw the first reading of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill in the House of Commons. This legislation will ban anyone born after 2008 from ever legally buying tobacco products and the anti-smoking lobby is promoting it with a new statistic: every day 350 young adults aged between 18 and 25 start smoking regularly.
The shift in rhetoric from ‘think of the children’ to 'think of the adults' reflects the fact that most people who try smoking these days do so when they are aged 18 or over. When you consider how few teenagers wait until they are 18 to buy alcohol or watch an 18-certificate film, this is a remarkable achievement, but how is it a justification for banning everyone born before a certain year from ever having that choice?
Underage smoking has often been used as an excuse to introduce policies that make life harder for adults, but even the strident anti-smoking activists at Action on Smoking and Health have always said that adults should be free to buy tobacco. That changed almost overnight when Rishi Sunak got behind the generational ban. The new argument is that adults should be banned from buying tobacco because most people who start smoking are adults.
This is unadulterated paternalism with the full force of the state behind it. It no longer matters whether you are over 18 and deemed to be a legally competent adult in every other respect because another group of adults has decided that it knows best. The ‘think of the children’ fig leaf has been discarded and the implications for consumers of other products that are currently legal are chilling. The velvet glove has been replaced by the iron fist. This is a fundamental shift in how the government approaches ‘public health’ issues and it deserves a more sober and considered national conversation than it has had so far.
