Britain’s anti-smoking groups and medical associations have sent a letter to England’s newly elected Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and his health secretary Wes Streeting, seeking to raise the issue of phasing out smoking in parliament with a bill suspended before the election, which Labour would have to rewrite because it belonged to the previous government from another party.
The smoking phase-out was approved by a majority in the lower House of Commons pending consideration by the upper House of Lords and its third reading before the election was called, lengthy procedures for which there was no time left until the 4th of July election and the bill was shelved until the election and the same legislative process postponed to the next government.
It would restrict that those born after 2009 would not be eligible to purchase tobacco products from the market due to the renewal of the current generation of citizens, leaving the same option for those born before 2009 raised in the preceding conditions, until no living person would be allowed to buy tobacco.
The now defunct “Tobacco and Vapes Bill” that would have forced a ban on future generations from buying tobacco was shelved by the previous Conservative government and Rishi Sunak who decided to pass it for approval through parliament, while the next Labour government that has emerged cannot handle it from the previous party and needs to draft another bill. This is the purpose of the letter sent by the country’s largest anti-smoking organisation Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), which in the recent past played a decisive role consolidating the anti-smoking campaign with the adoption of its concepts by the state, in collaboration with the Royal College of Physicians and Cancer Research UK to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health seeking mentioning the ban in the King’s Speech during the state opening of parliament.
Since the Prime Minister writes the King’s speech at the opening of each new parliamentary term, the organisations addressed him in the letter which they also sent to the Minister of Health in order to include the ban in the King’s speech to the upper and lower houses as a government priority.
In their letter addressing the new Labour government, the healthcare experts wrote that “Labour cannot achieve its manifesto commitment to halve differences in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions unless it prioritises ending smoking. There is no time to waste. Britain was the birthplace of the tobacco industry, which killed over 100 million people in the 20th century and is on track to kill one billion in the 21st, mainly in low and middle-income countries. The UK now has the chance to lead the world in phasing out smoking. The new Government must seize it with both hands.”.
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