BORIS JOHNSON: Rishi’s smoking ban is barmy. Child A will be free to smoke like a chimney to the end of his days. Child B – born only a day later – will be a criminal if he does… How the hell is that supposed to work?
It’s late at night and you’ve arrived back home after a few days away. As you turn the key in the lock you notice something funny: that window… you could have sworn you left it closed.
And as you go into the hallway you see your possessions strewn all over the place and your heart lurches — yup, it’s happened again.
You have been burgled. Someone has been in and violated your life. Some miserable tosser has rifled your drawers and he’s taken — oh no! — he’s taken your laptop, and he’s taken the TV, and it’s worse than that.
He has taken treasures you can’t replace — family stuff — things that will mean almost nothing to him but mean the world to you, and as you sit down on the stairs you might sob or groan or pound the wall with fury, and then you do what we all do in these circumstances. You call the police.
You pour it all out and I suppose — all being well — they might well come round in the morning.
In an ideal world they would bring some forensic kit — look at the window, dust it for fingerprints, take a detailed note of everything that has been stolen and give you some advice on the locks.
But you might not be so lucky. You might be the victim of one of those burglaries that the police do not even bother to attend — because they have got so many other calls on their time.
I found in my luggage the other day a dog-chewed cigar tube containing an unsmoked Romeo y Julieta. I have carried it around for years, in the vague belief that I might enjoy it one evening; but have never actually smoked it because I know that smoking is bad, writes BORIS JOHNSON
Rishi Sunak unveiled the controversial plan to phase out smoking in his conference speech
How would you feel, therefore, if you were told that the cops couldn’t come because they were dealing with a completely new category of crime?
How would you feel if police officers couldn’t come to deal with a burglary, because they were too stretched trying to stamp out a human activity that has been an accepted part of everyday life in Britain since Tudor times?
I think you would feel pretty cheesed off, if not positively enraged. But that is where we seem to be heading.
We are seriously proposing to ask our police to divert their time and resources away from all the other priorities — knife crime, sexual violence, county lines drugs gangs — and to focus on the legal enforcement of a nationwide ban on smoking.
We are proposing to criminalise yet another variety of ordinary behaviour, with no thought to the consequences for those who have to make it work.
Poll
Do YOU think smoking should be banned?
Do YOU think smoking should be banned?
Now share your opinion
If I understand it correctly, the idea is that the legal age for buying tobacco — it’s currently 18 — will be raised by a year every year, so a child who is 14 or under today will never be allowed to buy a cigarette.
When the age limit starts rising in 2027, there will be a legal distinction between those born before or after January 1, 2009: a smoking apartheid that will remain in place for the rest of their lives.
Child A will be free to smoke like a chimney to the end of his days. Child B — born only a day later! — will be a criminal if he does.
How the hell is that supposed to work?
Will shops have to demand ID cards from middle-aged customers, to show they were indeed born before January 1, 2009? And how will we check, in the decades to come, that A is not buying cigarettes for B?
Our shops are currently plagued by an epidemic of shoplifting — about which the police say they can do nothing. How will they cope with an age-based smoking ban, by which they must arrest a 20-year-old smoker but leave her 21-year-old sister alone?
What punishments will we impose? Fines? What if you refuse to pay?
Yes, folks, if this plan is to make any sense at all, it must logically mean that we are willing to send repeated and incorrigible scofflaws* to prison — for smoking!
Imagine how you would feel if you were desperate for justice from the courts — a rape victim, for instance, or one of the many thousands of others who face interminable delays — and you knew that the criminal justice system was being clogged with such ludicrous trivia; not just people who refuse to pay their TV licence, but people who simply refuse to obey the Government and continue, whatever their date of birth, to smoke cigarettes.
How would you feel? Fit to be tied, I expect. The whole thing strikes me as barmy.
The only other place to have embarked on this crazy scheme is New Zealand, where former prime minister Jacinda Ardern proposed a rolling ban on those turning 18 — shortly before she resigned
Yes, of course smoking is bad for your health and it is a good thing that it is gradually dying out.
The number of adult smokers has fallen dramatically in the last 40 years — from about 45 per cent of those over 18 in the 1970s, to less than 15 per cent today.
As a habit, smoking tobacco is less and less popular among young people, and in a few years’ time I expect the whole idea — of sucking smoke and tar into your lungs — will die of disapproval. But are we really going to ban something that remains legal in every other country in the world?
The only other place to have embarked on this crazy scheme is New Zealand, where former prime minister Jacinda Ardern proposed a rolling ban on those turning 18 — shortly before she resigned.
I observe that this proposed UK ban on smoking tobacco would be happening just as other countries — and several U.S. states — are actually liberalising their laws on other smokeable substances.
I am not saying that these places are right to free the weed; far from it: only that it is striking that the UK would appear to be going against a global tide of opinion that grown up human beings should be more trusted, not less trusted, to take decisions about what to smoke.
We seem to be about to embark on a new era of Prohibition, of contraband tobacco and illegal smoking parlours and speakeasies. A risky habit that has been gradually fading will be suddenly glamorised.
Underworld gangs will have a new opportunity to make money — and to create a new problem for the police.
Surely to goodness we have learned from the whole experience of Covid that we should not lightly criminalise everyday features of our lives. If the argument is that we must ban smoking for public health reasons, then what about obesity — now an even bigger killer? Are we going to ban sugar? Where does it end? What about booze?
I found in my luggage the other day a dog-chewed cigar tube containing an unsmoked Romeo y Julieta. I have carried it around for years, in the vague belief that I might enjoy it one evening; but have never actually smoked it because I know that smoking is bad and in the end — faced with the choice of having a quiet puff or taking a risk with my health — I always give that cigar a miss.
Across the country more and more people, especially young people, are making that same choice. They are exercising their personal responsibility.
That is the right way to deal with smoking — and not with a ban that will be either unenforceable or so painful in its enforcement as to distract the police from other vital tasks.
Let’s stop this endless inflation in the size and role of the state.
Let’s stop telling people what to do.
Dictionary Corner
*Scofflaw: a person who flouts the law, especially by failing to comply with a law that is difficult to enforce effectively
Source: Read Full Article
