Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Written evidence submitted by Dr Alistair Duff to The Tobacco and Vapes Public Bill Committee (TVB30).

Please consider the following brief points. I am writing in a personal capacity, as a concerned citizen, but with a background in social and political philosophy as well as academic, trade-union and parenting experience.

1. The proposed legislation, which essentially singles out tobacco (I have no knowledge of vaping and do not comment on it) for punitive treatment, is fundamentally illiberal, in the sense of interfering with the civil and private rights of the individual. It is paternalistic.

2. The proposed legislation - both the generational ban and the creeping restrictions, already very strict, on locations for tobacco use - is disproportionate. Any substance should be regulated according to its toxicity and lethality. It is certainly true that long-term tobacco use can be harmful; the average smoker lives 7 years less than the nonsmoker. However, it does not harm in the way that drugs do, as with pills ranging from LSD to ecstasy having potentially fatal effects on single-usage, or, as with heroin and other injected drugs, rapid descent into debilitating, life-changing addiction. The legislation is cracking a nut with a sledgehammer.

3. While tobacco can be, and frequently is, physically harmful over a 30-50 year time frame (fact: sellers of annuities will not offer better rates to anyone who has not smoked consistently, i.e. at least 10 cigarettes per day, for at least 20 years), smokers have factored in its very well-known risks. Some, bluntly, would prefer a somewhat shorter lifespan to their final decade spent dementing in a care home.

4. Smoking has been demonized by certain sections of the social establishment. One would expect this of the medical establishment, but the censoriousness from other elements is less justifiable. The fact is that smoking has no weakening or arousing effect on the mind. Smokers do not suddenly change. In this respect, it fares much better than alcohol, which was the original target of Prohibition not only because of the harms of alcoholism but because of the societal and domestic mayhem alcohol causes. Alcohol and tobacco take similar lengths of time to damage health - and alcohol not smoking is the main cause of death in working-age adults in the UK - but tobacco causes no social problems. So is it not inconsistent to pick on tobacco for a new prohibition? It is easy to look down on smoking while one sips one’s wine or swills one’s beer, but is this really fair?

5. It is true that nonsmokers should not be subjected to tobacco smoke against their will. This, however, is already the case. Outside areas, whether designated tables or sections, can easily be arranged so that nonsmokers are not disturbed. There ought in the name of humanity to be smoking areas not only outside pubs, but outside all hospitals and in prison yards. In fact, one could argue that the indoor ban is itself draconian, since it bans smoking even where all consent to it, as in a smoking lounge or a private cigar club. This is state overreach already on the statute-books, and if it cannot be realistically reversed, at least no more interference should be contemplated.

6. The chief medical officer, and many in his mould, say that the smoker is unfree. This is a false philosophy. The same philosophical argument was used for alcohol prohibition. The chief medical officer wants iatocracy [Greek for medical rule]. Your job as legislators, I humbly suggest, is to maintain democracy, not iatocracy. The people rejected Cromwell’s puritanism because it was not human. Liberty should be permitted where possible.

7. There is also a very disturbing hypocrisy at work, in respect of punishing tobacco while encouraging and advertising alcohol and all manner of other vices (betting, pornography, etc, which all flourish with government approval).

8. In Scotland, an even more absurd situation holds. Mind-bending drugs which one would never want one’s children to go anywhere near, are now legal, even as the Scottish government prepares to criminalise mere tobacco. Thus, as in rapidly degenerating cities such as San Francisco and New York, ‘potheads’ out of their minds roam free while decent citizens are demonized for enjoying a cigarette or pipe. This is outrageous, evidence of an upside-down culture.

9. The picture that the chief medical officer likes to paint is of the chain-smoking working-class addict. In fact, while that might be how she or he prefers to live, many smokers are not like that. My mother-in-law used to relax with one or two cigarettes after a hard day’s work as a farmer's wife. She is still alive at 97. Many cigar smokers smoke only occasionally, because the price of Cuban cigars is c. £20-£30. Many pipe-smokers live long lives, such as the philosophers Bertrand Russell and R. H. Tawney (both Left-wing intellectuals). In fact, most intellectuals in the past smoked, everyone from C. S. Lewis to Einstein, who credited some of their lucidity to their habit. Some successful people - and this might include yourselves - might want to reward themselves with a cigar in later life, as a mark of having achieved something. So the equality argument for prohibition is unsound.

10. The economic argument is also false. It was extremely surprising to see prime minister Rishi Sunak, as a former chancellor, coming up with the original prohibition bill. Not only because it goes against all conservative and liberal principles, but because as chancellor he will have known that tobacco provides a bankable sum of c. £10 billion per annum for the Treasury. The cost of lung cancer, etc, to the NHS is estimated to be far less than this; moreover, in living 7 years less, the savings on pensions must be colossal.

11. Finally, the generational ban is impractical, palpably so. It will create an allure for smoking among young people, as clumsy bans always do. It will also create a black market, with all the great evils associated with that kind of criminality. It will criminalise normal people. It will lead inexorably to a 50-year-old woman being arrested for smoking and her 51-year old partner being let off. It will divert police resources away from real crime to ‘easy collars’ wherever there is a cloud of smoke. It will, quite clearly, eventually have to be repealed. Better to drop the idea now.

12. Thus, the fanatical drive to extirpate the mild habit of smoking must be resisted. It is correct to educate the young against tobacco (and alcohol), to maintain the ban on advertising, and to protect nonsmokers from subjection to tobacco smoke against their will. One or two further adjustments could be made; the postulated ban in dedicated children’s parks strikes me as reasonable, for example. But beyond that legislation should not go. We do not, to reiterate, want iatocracy, but rather liberal democracy. And if we want iatocracy, then alcohol, gambling, motorbikes (my father, a medical doctor, warned against these above all, due to their fatality rate), and, for that matter, junk foods, salt and sugar, need to go too. The fact is that smoking rates are low and the present societal accommodation on the issue is more or less reasonable and just to all stakeholders. There is an irrational animus in the present social atmosphere, but there is no real crisis and the country does not need a solution, much less a draconian, prohibitionist and patently absurd one.

13. If you are beginning to feel uncomfortable with the generational ban (which has already been axed in New Zealand), on either liberal or pragmatic grounds, but think that it is politically impossible now for the government not to make a major statement of some kind, I suggest that you reconsider a mooted alternative, namely, raising the age for smoking to 21. This would be anomalous, given the age for marriage, joining the army, alcohol, gambling, etc, but at least it would not be absurd, unworkable and a gross violation of the civil rights of the mature.

December 2024.