Samiksha Bhattacharjee is the Head of Ladies of Liberty Alliance UK, a Young Voices UK contributor, and the President of the University College London Libertarian Society. You can find more of her work at Samiksha’s State of the Debate.
History will likely remember the Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026 as Keir Starmer’s final, desperate attempt at legacy-building — a “nanny state” vanity project passed just weeks before his premiership went up in smoke. Now, as Prime Minister Andy Burnham takes the reins at Downing Street, he inherits a broken prohibition strategy that may well define Labour’s economic and civil liberties policy for years to come.
This law does not only create a “smoke-free generation” by making it a criminal offence to sell tobacco to anyone born after 2009 (a rolling ban that raises the smoking age by one year, every year, forever). It also mandates standardised white packaging and bans retail displays for vapes, marking an aggressive escalation in the state’s war against harm reduction.
There is a staggering irony at play here. A government that has all but lost the trust of the public has decided it is the moral authority on what consenting adults are allowed to consume.
And while Andy Burnham promises a fresh start for the country, his government seems poised to enforce this authoritarian statute rather than repeal it.
I’m a young woman. I don’t smoke, or vape. Nor do I wish to. But I can still see that this creates a two-tier system of adult civil liberties. For my generation, this combined crusade against smoking and vaping represents something far more dangerous than a supposed health intervention. It is the death of the British adult.
Vape shops are independent businesses on our high streets that provide tailored advice, varying nicotine strengths, and a wide array of flavours — the exact combination that enables adult smokers to transition away from tobacco for good. Forcing these stores to hide away products, stripping packaging down to plain white boxes, and limiting flavour descriptions to single-name labels treats adult consumers like impressionable children.
If the state doesn’t trust us to choose what we put in our bodies, why should we trust the state with our votes?
Even putting aside the shredding of civil liberties, the combined war on smoking and vaping is public-health suicide and economically illiterate — an immediate fiscal nightmare handed straight to Prime Minister Burnham and his Treasury team.
The stats back me up. According to a recent analysis by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), legal tobacco sales have already plummeted by a staggering 52 per cent since 2021. Crucially, this drop has occurred before the new ban even takes effect, driven by the government’s aggressive taxing strategy. Since 2020, excise tax on cigarettes has risen by 73 per cent, and rolling tobacco by 115 per cent.
While the government celebrates “falling cigarette sales” as a health victory, the reality is much grimmer: people haven’t stopped smoking; they’ve just stopped buying from legitimate, taxed retailers.
The economic cost is clear. Tobacco duty revenues have fallen to their lowest on record after inflation, dropping from £10.4 billion to £7.9 billion. Over 20 billion cigarettes have effectively vanished from the legal books and reappeared in the pockets of criminal gangs. With the 1 January 2027 retail ban deadline fast approaching, Prime Minister Burnham is doubling down on a policy that starves the Exchequer of billions in revenue while handing the keys of a multi-billion-pound industry directly to organised crime.
By simultaneously cracking down on vaping — one of the very harm-reduction tools which helped Britain achieve record-low smoking rates thanks to smokers quitting them — the government has only accelerated the chaos. Research shows that in areas where flavoured vape bans exist, cigarette usage increases. As a former Health Secretary, Andy Burnham should know better than to endorse policies that punish consumers who are trying to make healthier choices. Yet, with new retail enforcement and display regulations looming, his administration risks marching down a path that starves local economies and restricts personal freedom.
When a government loses control of the economy and its own party, it often pivots to social engineering. It is far easier to dictate vape device colors and restrict retail signage than it is to fix the crumbling infrastructure of today.
This dual ban on smoking and vaping is the ultimate symbol of an out-of-touch elite. While the country fell apart, Keir Starmer spent too many of his final days in office obsessing over a “vanity legacy.” If Prime Minister Burnham wants to prove his administration represents genuine change rather than political continuity, he must scrap this lingering remnant of Starmerism. He must scrap these heavy-handed restrictions on vapes and abandon the authoritarian smoking ban.
It is time we stopped letting politicians treat us like perpetual children. If politicians in Westminster can’t even govern themselves, they have no business trying to micro-manage our lives.
Samiksha Bhattacharjee is the Head of Ladies of Liberty Alliance UK, a Young Voices UK contributor, and the President of the University College London Libertarian Society. You can find more of her work at Samiksha’s State of the Debate.
History will likely remember the Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026 as Keir Starmer’s final, desperate attempt at legacy-building — a “nanny state” vanity project passed just weeks before his premiership went up in smoke. Now, as Prime Minister Andy Burnham takes the reins at Downing Street, he inherits a broken prohibition strategy that may well define Labour’s economic and civil liberties policy for years to come.
This law does not only create a “smoke-free generation” by making it a criminal offence to sell tobacco to anyone born after 2009 (a rolling ban that raises the smoking age by one year, every year, forever). It also mandates standardised white packaging and bans retail displays for vapes, marking an aggressive escalation in the state’s war against harm reduction.
There is a staggering irony at play here. A government that has all but lost the trust of the public has decided it is the moral authority on what consenting adults are allowed to consume.
And while Andy Burnham promises a fresh start for the country, his government seems poised to enforce this authoritarian statute rather than repeal it.
I’m a young woman. I don’t smoke, or vape. Nor do I wish to. But I can still see that this creates a two-tier system of adult civil liberties. For my generation, this combined crusade against smoking and vaping represents something far more dangerous than a supposed health intervention. It is the death of the British adult.
Vape shops are independent businesses on our high streets that provide tailored advice, varying nicotine strengths, and a wide array of flavours — the exact combination that enables adult smokers to transition away from tobacco for good. Forcing these stores to hide away products, stripping packaging down to plain white boxes, and limiting flavour descriptions to single-name labels treats adult consumers like impressionable children.
If the state doesn’t trust us to choose what we put in our bodies, why should we trust the state with our votes?
Even putting aside the shredding of civil liberties, the combined war on smoking and vaping is public-health suicide and economically illiterate — an immediate fiscal nightmare handed straight to Prime Minister Burnham and his Treasury team.
The stats back me up. According to a recent analysis by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), legal tobacco sales have already plummeted by a staggering 52 per cent since 2021. Crucially, this drop has occurred before the new ban even takes effect, driven by the government’s aggressive taxing strategy. Since 2020, excise tax on cigarettes has risen by 73 per cent, and rolling tobacco by 115 per cent.
While the government celebrates “falling cigarette sales” as a health victory, the reality is much grimmer: people haven’t stopped smoking; they’ve just stopped buying from legitimate, taxed retailers.
The economic cost is clear. Tobacco duty revenues have fallen to their lowest on record after inflation, dropping from £10.4 billion to £7.9 billion. Over 20 billion cigarettes have effectively vanished from the legal books and reappeared in the pockets of criminal gangs. With the 1 January 2027 retail ban deadline fast approaching, Prime Minister Burnham is doubling down on a policy that starves the Exchequer of billions in revenue while handing the keys of a multi-billion-pound industry directly to organised crime.
By simultaneously cracking down on vaping — one of the very harm-reduction tools which helped Britain achieve record-low smoking rates thanks to smokers quitting them — the government has only accelerated the chaos. Research shows that in areas where flavoured vape bans exist, cigarette usage increases. As a former Health Secretary, Andy Burnham should know better than to endorse policies that punish consumers who are trying to make healthier choices. Yet, with new retail enforcement and display regulations looming, his administration risks marching down a path that starves local economies and restricts personal freedom.
When a government loses control of the economy and its own party, it often pivots to social engineering. It is far easier to dictate vape device colors and restrict retail signage than it is to fix the crumbling infrastructure of today.
This dual ban on smoking and vaping is the ultimate symbol of an out-of-touch elite. While the country fell apart, Keir Starmer spent too many of his final days in office obsessing over a “vanity legacy.” If Prime Minister Burnham wants to prove his administration represents genuine change rather than political continuity, he must scrap this lingering remnant of Starmerism. He must scrap these heavy-handed restrictions on vapes and abandon the authoritarian smoking ban.
It is time we stopped letting politicians treat us like perpetual children. If politicians in Westminster can’t even govern themselves, they have no business trying to micro-manage our lives.