It is an indictment of the intellectual vacuum in British politics that when a prime minister is looking for a legacy, they so often decide to give smokers another kicking. Tony Blair introduced a smoking ban to take our minds off Iraq, leaving office four days before it came into force in case things turned ugly. Theresa May set her successors the target of going ‘smoke-free’ by 2030 at the fag end of her time in Downing Street.
For Rishi Sunak, way behind in the polls and failing to meet most of his five targets, a generational ban on tobacco sales offers a place in the history books. Jacinda Ardern had the same idea in New Zealand, but the new centre-right government has decided to repeal her prohibitionist policies (which included taking nicotine out of cigarettes). So now Mr Sunak stands alone, carrying the torch of the New Zealand Labour party.
Prohibition has a bad name for a good reason and you don’t need to go back to 1920s America for the evidence
The plan is to ban anyone born after 2008 from ever buying any tobacco product, including cigars, pipe tobacco, heated tobacco, shisha and snuff. Even cigarette papers are included. In a decade’s time, a 26 year old will be able to legally buy cigarettes but a 24 year old will not.
But let’s face it, it won’t come to that. Within a couple of years the absurdity of having different rules for different adults will become glaring, the anti-smoking lobby will demand a ‘level playing field’ and the government will ban tobacco altogether.
Even among those of us who believe in liberty, there is a case for saying that the government should just get on with it and ban smoking outright rather than continuing with the death by a thousand cuts approach of the last 20 years. Perhaps the only way to bring the government to its senses is to hand the tobacco market over to criminal gangs and take £10 billion a year away from the Treasury. If you don’t like the tobacco industry now, wait until you meet the people who take over from it.
Whether it happens slowly or quickly, the UK is sliding towards prohibition. In the short term, the ban will seem merely preposterous, an eccentric British quirk that will baffle tourists and inconvenience retailers. Underage smokers will continue obtaining cigarettes illegally, as they do now, while young adults will obtain their cigarettes from older friends. This will lead to a grey market in sales between friends that will gradually expand as the years go by.
In the longer term, people born after 2008 will find it increasingly difficult to find people who will buy them tobacco, especially if the government bans proxy purchasing (as it has proposed). For adults captured by the generational ban, all roads lead to the black market.
Thanks to sky high rates of tobacco duty, which were hiked yet again last week, the illicit tobacco trade is already booming. According to official figures from HMRC, which are likely to be underestimates, one in nine manufactured cigarettes and one in three hand-rolled cigarettes were bought illegally in 2021/22. A further 4 per cent were bought abroad. If these cigarettes were sold legally at full price in the UK, HMRC would raise an extra £2.2 billion (plus VAT).
As the black market grows, tobacco tax revenues will decline, criminal gangs will become richer and more powerful, and – oh, sweet irony – children will find it easier to access cheap cigarettes.
Prohibition has a bad name for a good reason and you don’t need to go back to 1920s America for the evidence. The tiny kingdom of Bhutan banned tobacco sales in 2004 at a time when its smoking rate was very low. Western public health campaigners applauded the move, but a study in 2011 noted that it was accompanied by ‘smuggling and a thriving black market’.
15 years later, 22 per cent of Bhutanese 13-15 year olds were tobacco users. Among this age group, the World Health Organisation reports that ‘prevalence of current cigarette smoking increased continuously from 2009 to 2019’. So much for the ‘smoke-free generation’. The ban was lifted in 2021 because there were so many people smuggling tobacco into Bhutan that the government was worried that they were spreading Covid-19.
The irony is that Sunak announced the prohibition policy at the Conservative party conference during a speech in which he condemned his predecessors for short-term thinking and portrayed himself as the man to make sensible decisions in the nation’s longterm interests. But this policy will only start to bite after 2026 when Mr Sunak is likely to be long gone. Far from being a departure from short-termism, the generational ban is just another unworkable political gimmick designed to garner headlines. Sunak is essentially opening a new front in the war on drugs and leaving future governments to deal with the consequences.
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