Save our cigars!

There’s nothing new about Rishi Sunak’s reported proposals to phase out smoking in Britain. His plan has been borrowed from New Zealand’s former leader Jacinda Ardern, whose shamefully illiberal legacy includes the complete illegalisation of tobacco sales to those born after 1 January 2009.   

There’s nothing progressive about it, either. The Anglosphere’s elite war on tobacco is at least 400 years old. It can be traced back to James I in 1604, and his A Counterblaste to Tobacco, a sanctimonious treatise in which he denounced the new-world leaf ‘blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.’

A similar spirit informed New Labour’s 2006 Health act, which shoved pub smokers out on to the pavement to smoke like wretched dogs, instead of letting establishments choose whether or not to go smoke-free. Since then, tobacco tax hikes have hit us every year. 

Leaving aside the obvious scandal that a Conservative prime minister now seems incapable of defending basic ideas of freedom, it’s also worth pointing out that the government’s anti-tobacco narrative is based on lies.