The Government’s new policy for the graduated banning of tobacco is a terrible policy even if you think the objective is a good idea – indeed, even if you are generally strongly in favour of muscular interventions in the name of public health – for the simple reason that it is atrociously designed.
Alexander Bowen gave us chapter and verse on why this is on this site a few weeks ago, so I won’t steal his valour by repeating the arguments at length. Rishi Sunak offers absurd promises (getting smoking to zero), frames them with spurious counter-factuals (a model that contradicts the Government’s own commission and inflates projected smoking rates by 400 per cent), and promises to deliver them with laughably inadequate enforcement.
This probably shouldn’t surprise us. This ban was one of three policies cooked up in Downing Street for the Prime Minister’s conference speech in October; the other two were announcing the abolition of T Levels (in T Levels Week, without telling the T Levels Minister) and scrapping HS2 in favour of ‘Network North’, a scheme which originally promised to build a tram link to Manchester Airport that opened years before and is now filling in potholes in (north?) London.
But it is also, alongside Theresa May’s decision to enshrine our Net Zero commitment in law, a prime example of another woeful trend in our politics: the grandiose, lazy, blame-shifting, lunge-for-a-legacy policy. The hallmark of these is that a politician tries to get the credit for a nice idea whilst leaving all the hard work to others.
Take the smoking ban. As Bowen noted, the Government has not actually copied New Zealand’s ‘Smokefree Generation’ proposal – only the most eye-catching (and least-effective) strand of it.
Much more important to Wellington’s approach was the very radical step of banning the independent retail of cigarettes, setting up instead a national monopoly. This, alongside New Zealand being remote and thus hard to smuggle things into, would have allowed the state a much better shot at controlling the trade.
Not only has the Government not taken this step, it has gone one further. By setting the cut-off year after which young people won’t ever be able to (legally) purchase cigarettes at 2009, ministers have ensured the policy won’t take effect until 2027 – that is, safely into the next Parliament, when it will almost certainly be Sir Keir Starmer’s problem.
Assuming this policy is not abandoned as was New Zealand’s, this is going to be a thorny problem to solve. Tobacco revenue is very important to a lot of independent retailers; research suggests that by 2030, just three years in, these could be up to £10,000 per annum worse off as a result of the ban.
Even if you think Big Tobacco has massaged the precise figure, the core point remains; it would be very challenging to argue that tobacco income – plus all the extra spend from customers who enter the shop for tobacco – is not a substantial revenue source for many retailers. Then there are all the additional costs arising from more complicated enforcement, and so on. What happens to them?
Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t support a ban on tobacco; it is perfectly possible to think the cost/benefit adds up even accounting for a potentially devastating effect on the retail sector.
The point is that the Government has completely ducked the issue. By setting the start of the policy so far in the future, it has divorced the warm fuzzy feeling of voting against smoking from the hard trade-offs banning tobacco involves. That is not a recipe for considered and responsible policymaking.
(In fact, not only will the practicalities be Labour’s to work out but if the above-quoted research is anything close to accurate, the impact on retailers will be really starting to hurt just in time for an election in 2029.)
It’s the same story with Net Zero. It’s undoubtedly a good objective (done right, at least). But once again, MPs opted for the sugar rush of voting for the nice thing whilst setting a hard deadline for comfortably after they will have left office – kicked into the long run. And once again, that has spared them the need to confront the ugly political choices getting there will involve.
A clean grid will require up to 460,000km of new power lines, for example, yet it’s a rare politician today who can resist objecting to a single pylon (or solar farm, or wind turbine) in their own seat.
Both policies are lazy attempts to call dibs on a legacy in such a way as the politician wins either way. If it founders on any or all of the practical challenges they declined to confront, they can denounce their successors for failing to live up to their noble ambitions. If those successors do through hard graft actually deliver the promised outcome, the politician who first set the airy goal gets to steal the credit.
The current era of short-lived prime ministers has been bad for politics for all sorts of reasons; one is surely that instead of building a legacy in concrete things they actually achieved, our leaders instead now try to conjure one by setting a remote deadline for an aspiration and letting others work out the details.
May might get to be the prime minister who kicked off the green revolution; Sunak the one who ended the scourge of smoking. But only if other people make all the political sacrifices and do all the work.
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Author: Henry Hill
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