Sunak’s smoking ban shows the Tories no longer believe in freedom
It was a small moment in history, but nonetheless significant. A political leader announced to his party’s conference a new policy: a graduated ban on smoking, by age group, that would eventually make use of tobacco products totally illegal. Hardly surprising, one might say, in the current climate of ever-tighter state control, with authoritarian governments progressively eliminating personal freedoms and the autonomy of citizens on a daily basis.
Except for one detail: this gathering was not a Labour rally, nor a meeting of the neo-Stalinist Scottish parliament, but the annual conference of the Conservative Party and the control freak making the announcement was the supposedly Conservative prime minister. You could not ask for a better encapsulation of the degeneration of the Tory Party than that snapshot of petty totalitarianism.
Toryism is about freedom under law. It is not “libertarianism”, with its ambition to evict the state even from its legitimate responsibilities; it is a balanced approach that treads a fine, but well-defined, line between the rights of the individual and the good of the wider community. This draconian proposed new law demonstrates that, through losing their philosophical identity, the Tories have also lost the moral compass and intuitions that formerly made them the most reliable moderators between private and state rights.
Smoking is an unhealthy habit that kills many people. The government has a clear obligation to publicise that fact. It has a right to ensure that up-to-date medical research confirming the hazards is placed prominently in the public domain, via graphic posters in hospitals and GP surgeries. It is not only permissible, but desirable, that clinicians and researchers should feature in the media – not to the relentless, mind-numbing degree that climate alarmists dominate the BBC, but sufficiently often to keep the topic within public awareness. Doctors, in any case, will routinely advise their patients to cut down or abandon the smoking habit altogether.
Thereafter, in a free society, the parameters of state intervention have been reached. Toryism respects the absolute autonomy of the individual to make an informed decision. It is not for the state to prohibit a practice which, though greatly in decline, has been a legitimate recreation for individuals over almost five centuries. The Tory tradition holds that adults have the right to make their own decisions.
But the term “adult” has been corrupted by today’s faux Conservatives. When the pathetic figure who today stands in the place of Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher announced his diktat, he and the other “technocrat” androids approving this latest elimination of British liberty like nodding donkeys were “the adults in the room”, in the sycophantic jargon of the establishment media. Every suppression of Tory instincts is hailed with the mantra: “The grown-ups are back in charge.”
It is “grown-up” to want your country to remain as a despised vassal state of the Brussels kleptocracy; to claim that mass immigration benefits Britain, to secure cheap labour, regardless of the cultural, social and other problems. Yet these same pinstriped importers of further problems start tut-tutting hypocritically when they see scenes in central London that illustrate how far and in what direction our culture has been enriched. They are the grown-ups: the serial buffoons who have broken Britain, who claimed that the seven years from 2016 to 2023 was too short a time for all the Russell Group starred Firsts in Whitehall to revise more than a few hundred rump EU laws. They are the Tories.
And they applauded Sunak’s announcement – the Conservatives, the party of responsibility and free agency – with all the zeal of a Jeremy Corbyn rally. They have lost all sense of the limits of the state. Just as Boris Johnson became addicted to squandering taxpayers’ money, his party experiences withdrawal symptoms if it is not making other people’s lives miserable. Net zero is a sadistic scheme to reduce Britons to penury: “You will own nothing and you will be happy.”
The Tory faithful needed a fix; in default of a new lockdown, banning smoking was better than nothing. It is not even a fresh idea – the Tories do not have the facility for new thinking any more – but a hand-me-down policy from the New Zealand Labour Party in the days of the dementedly woke Jacinda Ardern.
The British public, too, supports this dictatorial prescription. That is unsurprising, for two reasons. Many people have given up smoking and have the converted sinner’s disdain for the unregenerate; and lockdown changed, as it was intended to do, the mentality of the public. Since 1945, over several generations, the Nanny State (a term coined by Iain Macleod) had progressively enveloped Britons in an initiative-sapping cocoon of womb-to-tomb dependency.
Brexit broke that habit of dependency, to the alarm of the elites, for whom the pandemic came as a godsend pretext to reassert the arbitrary power of the state by locking down the nation. For thirteen years the Conservative Party has formed the government. During that period, the British public has had even the most intimate aspects of life subjected to gross abuse by the intruder state.
Banning activities is not the natural instinct of Tories: it is a socialist obsession, the way in which tin-pot dictators enforce their prejudices on everyone else. Free speech is no more. People routinely lose their livelihoods for stating scientific truths. Could the Conservative prime minister not have announced an end to Britain as a prison camp, if he was looking for a big idea?
Instead, bans, punitive taxes, increasing rather than reducing immigration, followed by a dictatorial pledge to “bulldoze” planning protections for local communities – Burke’s “little platoons” – to alleviate a housing shortage largely caused by the unsustainable immigration the Tories refuse to halt are the items on the government’s suicide note to the nation. Britain has sufficient brownfield sites to accommodate three years’ optimum housebuilding, but it gives political jobsworths a greater power rush to enclose Miss Marple-style villages with community-erasing housing estates. Just like HS2.
The Starmer government will follow the faux-Conservative agenda quite happily. You, quite literally, could not put a fag paper between the two parties. Labour has already announced it will maintain the smoking ban: blocking other health hazards such a puberty blockers and sex-change surgery for youngsters, not so much. The likelihood is that the Starmer government will seriously alienate the public during its first term, while the gruesome memory of the Conservatives remains fresh in voters’ minds. That is when, around 2026/27, the first real possibility will arise of a recalibration of British politics.
The Reform Party conference showed the first green shoots of that possibility; it was as vital as the Conservatives were moribund. Nigel Farage had fun at the Tory conference, showing some ankle to the Tory rank and file, who gawped at him curiously as that rarity they had not seen since 1990: a leader. His speech to Reform was both hilarious and hit the salient points. First past the post is the big obstacle to Reform; but if the next election produces a hung parliament, the smaller parties would insist on proportional representation as a condition of keeping Starmer in power.
In that eventuality, Reform would be knocking on an open door next time out. If Reform could join with the majority of the National Conservatism movement, whose conference last May highlighted the intellectual poverty of the Tories, that would give the party intellectual heft. Add to that the potentially large defections from the husk of the Conservative Party and a formidable force could be forged.
It is all speculative, of course, but contempt for the anti-conservative, statist, high-tax, globalist Tory Party is now so universal that something must give. It is curiously fitting that a mean-minded, Antipodean socialist ban on smoking should have been the last gasp of the Conservative Party before it exits public office. That is Rishi Sunak’s legacy.
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