Alexander Wept

On the Great British smoking ban.

The Siesta by Paul Gauguin (1892-96)

I wonder, I wonder how the campaigners at Action on Smoking and Health feel this morning. Their mission to kill off the dreaded cigarette is all but accomplished.

No doubt those righteous souls celebrated the passage of prime minister Sunak's petty smoking ban with Dionysian indulgence. You bet. First, they broke a 5k personal best. Next, they plunged into an ice bath. Of course, they livestreamed the event for the consumption of like-minds who never forget to mention that their alarm clock goes off at 4 a.m. every morning.

Amid the glee, I'd imagine lurked a certain trepidation. Smoking is all-but banned for anyone born after 2009. What will the campaigners do then? And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept… for there were no more worlds to conquer. Reader, once upon a more cerebral time, films such as Die Hard quoted ancient thinkers such as Plutarch. How far we done fell.

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Save for a few liberty-minded holdouts, British MPs this week indulged in a world-first. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which raises the legal age of smoking by one year every year, sailed through the Commons.

This means 15-year-olds will never legally buy tobacco. This means 65-year-old me will one day walk into a shop to purchase a packet of Bensons for a polite, somewhat sheepish middle-aged man.

In a throwback to a bygone era in which lawmakers routinely grasped intellectual nettles, a few MPs set out the case for antiquations such as freedom, equality under the law, and the adult's right to choose. On waxed ears, those passé considerations fell.

This new law is most agreeable if you view reality as a spreadsheet, with individuals as numbers to be manipulated and shuffled into columns and rows. Remove X to increase the value of Y. Just don't mention that Krispy Kreme doughnuts kill more than cancer sticks. In England and Scotland, obesity is a bigger killer than smoking.

Sunak's ban enjoys wild popularity with that incoherent, chimerical beast known as The British Public. For that reason, the ban enjoys wild popularity with those opportunistic beasts known as the British Political class.

The opinion polls, those barometers of human ingenuity, say two-thirds of the British public support a two-tier notion of adulthood. Some adults will enjoy freedom of choice in a liberal democracy.

Some born just minutes or seconds after December 31, 2008, will not.

And yet, fifty-nine percent of that public says adults should be free to smoke super-strength brain-wobbling weed—a drug whose modern incarnation bears little resemblance to its munchies-inducing ancestors. Fourteen percent of that same British public believes that there's a monster lurking in Loch Ness.

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Neither did the starkest numerical arguments glimmer the bubble of the history-makers. Questions such as 'How will it work?' calibrated especially to appeal to a class of proud philistines and STEM-boosting Babbitts, fell flat.

I suppose both the philosophical and the practical were destined to fail. Why should the how and the why disturb the still-wet ink drying on the pages of history?

What matters is this ban is The First. New Zealand junked their claim to that lurid title. What matters is that our unelected Prime Minister, the work experience kid handed the job after twice failing the interview, gets a shiny laminated certificate proving his 541 days in office were not a heinous waste of his time and the time of seventy-million people—none of whom voted for him.

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Sunak lifted this ludicrous fever dream from the Covid pandemic's scold-in-chief, former Kiwi prime minister, Jacinda Ardern. The current conservative government junked it on day one.

The pandemic did it. For the first time, killjoys earned social plaudits for their primitive traits. Social media has clotted such people together. No longer succoured by grassing up their neighbours for putting the bins out early, the modern scolds envelop social media feeds with their neurotic demands. Swaddled in toxic empathy, the crybullies resort to common refrain: We're just saving lives. Now shut up before we beat you into jelly with our 'Be Kind' placards.

Declining cultures surrender to pettifogging and suspicion. The scolds won't stop at smoking. Overnight, they shifted toward the evils of vaping. As Mencken said, they're haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

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Boris Johnson, the last prime minister elected the old-fashioned way—by the people—said the smoking ban was 'absolutely nuts.' Boris lamented: The party of Churchill is banning cigars? Indeed, they are.

His bewilderment is well-placed. And yet, like his hero Winston Churchill, Boris is a dying breed. Both were and are turn-of-the-twentieth-century traditional liberals.

For political necessity, both plied their trade in the Conservative Party. That's the reality of our consumptive two-party system.

The old Liberal Party, whose vast achievements both the Tories and Labour shamelessly appropriate, was intellectually, morally, and spiritually superior to today's Conservative gruel or Labour pigswill. Today, liberals have nowhere to go. The most prominent Liberal Democrats (the successor to the old Liberal party) voted for Sunak's flagship policy.

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Much like Scotland's hate crime laws, this ban symbolises a nation long on Twitter-brained platitudes and short on rational thinking. Our Very Online age seethes with clickbait logic. This era understands reflection only in the most literal sense. Whatever reflects our personal desires is the only acceptable consideration. Everything else is gaslighting.  

That monkey-mindedness plays well in the swamps of social media. The cruder and more extreme one's rhetoric, the more clicks and 'engagement' one summons. There's no bandwidth to waste on deliberation, nuance, compromise, or debate—those are antiquated abstractions. My tribe wants this. My tribe swings the bigger club. My tribe wins.

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That's not to say there are good arguments for smoking. My anti-social habit, shared by one billion other mortals, is not cool or glamorous. My old high school's smoking warden, bless her soul, was right. Smoking isn't big nor clever. Smoking killed her, too.

Smoking kills half of those who often addicted themselves as teenagers and continued to puff away after middle age.

But there are unassailable arguments for the individual's right to make bad or undesirable choices. At least, I thought those arguments were unassailable. This nation birthed many of those high-minded, high-reaching liberal ideals. It was fun whilst it lasted.

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