As promised earlier in the year by the prime minister Rishi Sunak, parliament has started debating the catastrophic Tobacco and Vapes Bill that includes a generational ban on tobacco preventing the next along with all subsequent generations from purchasing tobacco with the criterion of their generation having been born after 2009. This corresponds to time ticking with the age limit to buy tobacco increasing with time by one year every year that goes by and would eventually eradicate tobacco sales before tobacco is withdrawn from the shelves because everyone entitled to purchase it would have died in the future.
The prime minister was planning for the bill to be put through parliament in February but this is happening by the 20th of March during which voting will take place in the lower House of Commons. The proposed restriction addressing the next and future generations has already been repealed in New Zealand by the coalition government that emerged from the elections on the 24th of November 2023. The bill is supported by the entire main opposition Labour Party but not by all Conservative MPs with many or even most or as much as half of those disagreeing or having reservations.
The director of fanaticised antismoking organisation Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) Deborah Arnott is retiring in September and she supported the bill by saying that “The ground-breaking legislation put before parliament today sets a course to the extinction of smoking in the UK. Every day 350 young adults aged between 18 and 25 start smoking regularly, risking a lifetime of addiction, disease, disability and premature death. Smoking is the silent killer that hides in plain sight, killing more people than COVID at the height of the pandemic. Ending this scourge on society cannot come soon enough.”.
Rishi Sunak who is passing the bill through parliament under his own initiative said that “If we want to build a better future for our children we need to tackle the single biggest entirely preventable cause of ill-health, disability and death: smoking. That is why, alongside new measures to curb the alarming rise in youth vaping, we are delivering on our commitment to create a smokefree generation and stop our kids from getting hooked on harmful cigarettes and other nicotine products. This important change will save thousands of lives and billions of pounds for our NHS, freeing up new resource that can be spent to improve outcomes for patients right across the UK.” whilst the health secretary Victoria Atkins follows suit to agree with the prime minister and said that “Smoking kills. It takes around 80,000 lives in the UK every year and causes one in four cancer-related deaths. It’s therefore only right we take robust action to protect future generations from these harmful products. Today is a significant milestone, representing the single biggest preventable health policy in a generation with a first-of-its-kind Bill aimed at preventing our children and young people from falling prey to a lifetime of nicotine addiction. This landmark legislation will ensure generations to come will have healthier lives, while freeing up NHS capacity by removing the huge pressure caused by smoking-related illness.”.
However, those voiced concerns by the government are mostly practical with no theoretical principles to back them up and justify their implementation. The word “underage” has been used by the government website in the context of preventing “underage sales” of tobacco and vaping products, but underage will mean that the “underage” person will be one year older every year and will still be under the age to buy tobacco. This will place increasingly older citizens in the same category with children and teenagers who should be those in all who cannot exchange money for tobacco. And hence the Tobacco and Vapes Bill lacks the principle of preventing children and teenagers from purchasing tobacco because they will be in the same category as older people who will not be eligible to purchase tobacco and their young age will no longer be the reason why that happens.
Bring Back Smoking Freedom 