Labour’s war on smoking has nothing to do with our health

When Labour’s plan to ban smoking in certain outdoor areas was revealed last week, PM Keir Starmer insisted that it would ‘reduce the burden on the NHS and the taxpayer’.

Many commentators were sceptical of Starmer’s rather rushed justification. And with good reason. Countless studies have shown that smokers require less healthcare spending than non-smokers over the course of their lifetime, largely because they die earlier than non-smokers. Furthermore, the claim that smokers are at the root of the NHS’s difficulties defies common sense. The NHS has been in existence for over 75 years now. There are far, far fewer smokers than there were in 1948, the year of the NHS’s inception. So how can smokers be the single most acute threat to the capacity of the NHS in 2024?

It’s difficult to avoid the impression that Labour’s persecution of smokers is driven less by healthcare concerns than by a dull, technocratic puritanism – a desire to control and regulate people’s lifestyles. This was partially exposed by Labour’s Commons leader Lucy Powell in comments she made over the weekend. Labour doesn’t only intend to eliminate smoking, she said, but the ‘scourge’ of vaping and e-cigarettes, too.

If Labour really was concerned about the negative health impact of smoking, then why go after vaping? It is one of the best established methods for getting smokers to ditch cigarettes. Even the now defunct Public Health England, the kind of quango Starmerites tend to revere, identified vaping as a generally safe means to reduce smoking in a report published as recently as 2018.

The fact that Labour has targeted vaping as part of its war on smoking provides a troubling insight into our ruling party. Like too much of what passes for the left today, it’s driven by a desire to tell ordinary people how to live their lives. Starmer, like so many joyless puritans, can’t help but impose his dreary passion for order, health and conformity on others when the chance presents itself.

The clampdown on smoking will have far-reaching cultural and economic effects, and none of them positive. The British Pub and Beer Association has warned that hundreds more pubs could close their doors over the next five years if the planned restrictions became law. The industry is already a shadow of its former self after the Covid lockdowns. It isn’t hard to see how discouraging smokers from enjoying a pint in the pub beer garden will deal another blow to an industry already on its knees. More broadly, Labour’s war on smoking and vaping will accelerate Britain’s decline from a live-and-let-live society to an increasingly prohibitionist one.

Given Labour’s puritanical, prohibitionist impulses, there is little doubt the nanny-state crackdowns will stop at smoking. We need to stand up to Starmer’s boundless regulatory zeal before he comes for our other freedoms.

Hugo Timms is an intern at spiked.