Freedom goes up in smoke – again

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill, featuring a generational ban on buying tobacco, returned to the Lords this week. Watch my intervention and check out a new report by my colleague, Rob Lyons.

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill is back under consideration in the House of Lords. The most striking feature is a ban on anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 buying tobacco products. The idea is that these people will just shrug their shoulders, accept smoking will never be for them, and eventually smoking will just die out.

Of course, this is nonsense. People will carry on smoking, even if the proportion of adults currently smoking has been in long-term decline. After all, underage smoking is still fairly common. Somehow, young people aged under 18 are able to get hold of cigarettes. If age restrictions aren’t working now, banning a generation of people from ever smoking seems unlikely to work, either. Instead, ever-older people will turn to illegal means of buying tobacco – from shops that flout the ban or from the black market, which is already thriving thanks to sky-high tobacco taxation.

The worry is that ever-greater steps towards prohibition not only restrict our choices but also threaten to bring all the familiar side effects of prohibition: illegal sales, declining tax revenues and, most worryingly, violence and intimidation. This is already happening in Australia thanks to high taxation. Do we really want that here, too?

I’m pleased, therefore, that my colleague Rob Lyons has just written a short report, The Price of Prohibition for the smokers’ rights organisation Forest. (You can read it online here.) Even if you’re not a smoker or remotely interested in smoking, you should read the report because this creeping prohibition is going to affect us all.

I’ve been saying my piece in the Lords on this legislation this week. You can find clips below. Having passed the Commons, the Lords is the last chance to bring some common sense to bear and push back on the worst elements of this bill. Fingers crossed.

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Here’s a bit of background listening - back in 2023, we held a discussion at the Battle of Ideas festival on Simon Clark’s Letter on Liberty on smoking. Called Freedom: Up in smoke? Despite knowing the consequences of cigarettes – addiction, poor health and even death – why do so many still enjoy it? Does the glamorisation of smoking in the arts from James Dean to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag pose a problem for public health? Or should we accept that smoking – like drinking or sky-diving – is a risk we should be allowed to take?