Nicotine is a brilliantly malevolent molecule. It stimulates reward receptors in the brain that light up with satisfaction at a job well done. The addict registers its absence as an agony of incompletion. The next dose bathes the aching brain in a glow of bogus accomplishment. This makes tobacco great business. The customer can’t stop coming back for the product.
As an ex-smoker, I can testify that many of those purchases feel rational. Cravings are unpleasant. Making them go away by the most efficient means available seems like an obvious, necessary course of action. While that choice has been made without external compulsion, it is conditioned by addiction, which promotes short-term, impulsive behaviour and mutes the cognitive processes required for more analytical judgment.
I have no idea whether Rishi Sunak knows that feeling, but he clearly hates smoking enough to want credit for its eventual eradication. This is a personal mission for the prime minister. His proposal to ban future cigarette sales to anyone currently 15 or younger offers little by way of political gratification.
Beneficiaries of a new law would be numerous but invisible. They are the non-smokers of the future. The extra years of life they might enjoy in decades to come will not translate into votes for Sunak in 2024. Whereas even a small number of rebellious backbench Conservatives, outraged by an infringement of smokers’ liberties, can damage their leader by undermining his authority – even if their rebellion fails. And it won’t succeed, because Labour is guaranteeing the measure free passage through the House of Commons.
Keir Starmer’s endorsement will only aggravate Tory suspicions that Sunak has lapsed into the worst kind of bossy, heavy-handed, lefty government. Liz Truss warns that a Conservative government should not be seeking to “extend the nanny state”.
A fair practical criticism of the plan points to the absurdity of a threshold cohort, born either side of 2009, growing into adulthood with differential access to tobacco. Will 50-year-olds one day have to show ID when buying cigarettes for their 49-year-old friends? Probably not. The function of the ban is to start phasing out the retail market altogether.
Tory rebels are not animated by the question of how the policy might work, but what it represents in principle. The aversion to “nannying” is economic and moral. Meddlesome states are held to be inefficient, because they cultivate dependency and suffocate spirits of enterprise. But they are also feared on the grounds that curtailing individual economic freedoms in the name of a collective interest tends inevitably towards political coercion. It is a slippery slope towards socialist tyranny.
Only in ideological fever dreams is Sunak a proto-Bolshevik. He is a very rightwing prime minister by modern British standards. Unlike Truss, he was a believer in Brexit from the very start. He was not an apostle of Boris Johnson’s vaguely egalitarian levelling-up agenda. He has weakened environmental targets, and during the pandemic he was the lockdown-sceptics’ friend in the Treasury. His asylum policy is so hardline that even Theresa May has qualms. When he says he believes in cutting taxes – and is only waiting for the opportune moment, there is no reason to doubt him.
But Sunak gets no credit for agreeing with ideological purists because his record is contaminated with bouts of pragmatic government: the Windsor framework and other accommodations with European reality; tax rises justified by the need to keep the NHS solvent; subsidising energy bills when Russian military aggression sent prices soaring; letting legal migration rise to fill labour market shortages.
Sunak has been versatile enough to give the Tory right grounds to think him prone to treason, and insistent enough on his orthodox Thatcherite credentials to alienate anyone who might once have seen his ideological flexibility as a virtue.
That is why the anti-nicotine crusade feels quixotic. It is easy enough to see why the health-conscious, teetotal prime minister might abhor smoking. But it would be just as easy to imagine the pro-market, small-state Conservative leader recoiling from nanny statecraft in countless other areas.
He has diluted anti-obesity measures planned under Boris Johnson, although there is compelling evidence that salty, sugary snacks are addictive. Junk food also debilitates the individual will to abstain. It causes deadly disease, costs the state enormous sums in healthcare and is supplied by a vast industry with few incentives for voluntary self-restraint. Opposition to regulating toxic mulch that barely qualifies as food in nutritional terms is no more robust than the case for treating smoking as a lifestyle choice instead of what it is – a drug habit.
This is precisely why libertarian Tories take such fright at Sunak proffering a tentative hand towards nanny. By illuminating the place where the right to make a profit collides with a collective social interest, the prime minister has blundered into free-market heresy.
This would not be such a problem for the rebels if they were confident that Britain was populated with libertarian fundamentalists. But it isn’t. The smoking ban is popular. The view that poison shouldn’t be marketed to children is uncontroversial.
One lesson from the pandemic, and a reason it coincided with so many Conservatives losing their ideological and mental composure, is that most people do not see government as an intrinsically malign force. They might mistrust politicians and suspect that public money is routinely misspent, but in times of insecurity the state is a reassuring presence, not a sinister intrusion.
And the times of insecurity have not passed. No one who relies on public services can reasonably assert that Britain suffers from an overactive state. This is why Labour is happy to come to Sunak’s aid. The opposition is not afraid of the nanny label if it raises the prospect in voters’ minds of a different kind of government, one that sees decay all round and actually intends to do something about it.
For 13 years, the Tories have made Britain a laboratory for the theory that state provision of public goods is socially debilitating and economically stultifying. But cutting the supply of government generates new and more urgent demand, which cancels out any budget savings. Fewer police officers make for unsafe streets. Slashing local government budgets means people who were once looked after by the council end up on NHS wards; waiting lists go up. Underfunding prisons leads to endemic recidivism. And on it goes.
The Tories’ compulsive return to a cherished belief, in spite of all the evidence that it causes harm, resembles an addiction. If, as seems likely, they are ejected from power later this year, this will be the reason. Britain has had enough of government by deliberate neglect. To want a state that functions humanely is a reasonable political demand, not a symptom of infantilised craving for nanny. A party that can’t tell the difference is hooked on ideological poison.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
