(PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, says a future Labour government will consider measures to incrementally ban smoking. Labour is watching New Zealand, which legislated to criminalise every potential smoker born after 2009. That generation will never legally smoke.
I understand Labour’s desire to do something about the NHS, whose unravelling is, quite rightly, a national obsession. Smoking is dangerous, and it should be discouraged. But banning it is illiberal, unfair, and it won’t work. It will criminalise poverty — poor people smoke more — and it will pass tax revenue from the Exchequer, which can offer mitigation and support with quitting, to criminal gangs, who don’t. Tax revenue on cigarettes is £10 billion a year. Smoking costs the NHS £2.5 billion a year. Whatever smokers do or don’t do, they pay for themselves, and more besides.
