Comment of encouragement and support made to Simon Clark’s blog “Taking Liberties”

Thank you for having a very fruitful debate on this urgent issue of the threat of an incremental generational ban on buying tobacco.

The problem is very urgent because it is very likely to be enforced by a prospective Labour government. However, it is not as likely to be enforced by the Conservatives, who do not condone counter-smoking restrictions like the Labour Party, and well pointed out that David Cameron disagreed with plain packaging legislation and so does Rishi Sunak pay much less attention to the generational endgame.

Plain packaging was in fact passed through parliament by the health minister Jane Ellison alone without David Cameron’s agreement, and for her to do that she had been probed and ‘reminded’ to by antismoking proponents, just like Rishi Sunak has been probed by antismoking proponents to be supposedly considering the Labour Party’s generational endgame.

We must argue against it to prove that it is not right and that it is wrong. We must argue that if adults cannot smoke for the rest of their life until they die, then that is what was happening when they got born, and that life has no meaning if you get to die like you were born.

The purpose of the law to set a minimum age limit for the purchase of tobacco is to prevent and deter underage smoking, because as you would expect, children and underage teenagers cannot buy cigarettes and tobacco, but that is not the same cause when you increment that age limit as a variable, in which case it should not exist at all and does not have the same purpose.

So this takes advantage of the existence of the law that is punished to make it say what the government wants, not what it should but what a small minority of at least one person wants it to say, which is not right, because just because something is possible, it does not necessarily mean that it should happen, constituting the abuse of their power and their position of control, which should be exercised under a written constitution and be supervised by its adherence by politicians who should have limits imposed on them on what they can and cannot decide on and what they can or cannot vote on.

Having this obscene restriction amounts to the deprivation of liberty of the citizens and the deprivation of their legal mature responsibility, and means that they cannot live here anymore and if they want or decide they want to smoke when they turn 18 they must go somewhere else to live and move to another country where that will be possible.

Not letting people live is not right and not letting them live in their country is not right. It is rather than that the ace taken out of the state’s sleeve that gives them the solution they want to the health-related problem of smoking, and another one is the exorbitantly high and excessively taxed prices of cigarettes that make them unaffordable and therefore inaccessible to most people.

Commented under http://taking-liberties.squarespace.com/blog/2023/10/3/conservative-government-in-name-only-watch-this-space.html