The Government’s new plan to raise the legal smoking age each year was one of the centrepieces of Rishi Sunak’s less-than-successful Conservative Party conference speech last autumn. What does our panel of Tory activists think of it?
Ministers’ case for this “historic” measure (the Goverment’s own word for it) is that “smoking is the UK’s biggest preventable killer” which “costs the economy £17 billion a year” and “puts huge pressure on the NHS”.
“It is expected to mean up to 1.7 million fewer people smoke by 2075 – saving tens of thousands of lives, saving the health and care system billions of pounds and boosting the economy by up to £85 billion by 2075. It would also avoid up to 115,000 cases of strokes, heart disease, lung cancer and other lung diseases.”
The counter-case as put on this site by Henry Hill is that “there is in fact, in public health terms, no such thing as a “preventable” death. There are only postponable deaths: everyone is going to die of something, and the odds are that in the case of most people who quit cigarettes, that something is going to be more expensive”
Alexander Bowen has argued on this site that New Zealand, from which Sunak drew the policy, has rowed back on it – and planned to implement it differently in any event. Harry Phibbs has questions about enforceability.
Whether for these reasons or others, over a third of our panel support the Government’s plans. But over half oppose them – a clear majority oppose the proposals.
Liz Truss has called the policy “profoundly unconservative”. What’s unconservative? Discuss. But what can certainly be said is that it’s illberal and, in this case, Party members line up with individual freedom against government coercion.