Stop scapegoating smokers. Haven’t we suffered enough?

There are few public places where we can enjoy a cigarette. Now Keir Starmer seems intent on turning even casual smokers into social lepers

Keir Starmer clearly hasn’t read much Oscar Wilde. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the hedonistic Lord Henry Wotton articulated a view that continues to be held by millions across Britain – especially drinkers in beer gardens.
“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied,” the noted philosophe says. “What more can one want?”
Quite a lot more, if you are the Prime Minister. Despite prisons bursting at the seams, a £22 billion budget black hole and a general sense of decline, Starmer has turned his attention to tackling the real problem facing Britain: those of us who smoke outside.
Starmer has supported proposals to extend Tony Blair’s indoor smoking ban to pub terraces, outdoor restaurants and nightclub smoking areas, as well as outside sports stadia, children’s play areas and universities. It is a radical departure from Rishi Sunak’s proposal to ban anyone born after 2008 from ever legally buying tobacco, which Labour promised to implement after winning last month’s election.
“My starting point on this is to remind everybody that over 80,000 people lose their lives every year because of smoking,” Starmer told reporters on Thursday. “That is a preventable death, it’s a huge burden on the NHS, and of course, it is a burden on the taxpayer.”
With this wheeze, Starmer seems hell-bent on turning even the most casual social smoker into a social leper – casting us as feckless idiots incapable of making grown-up decisions and whose bad behaviour endangers the NHS and kills children.
As a fairweather smoker who likes nothing more than lighting up with an al fresco pint on a summer’s day, the proposed policy makes it clear that those in power (of either major party) do not trust the public over whom they rule. It is a sorry state of affairs.
Starmer is right in one respect: smoking is a leading cause of preventable illness and death that causes tens of thousands to die each year. Yet he is wrong to say that smokers are a “burden on the taxpayer”. The Treasury raises almost £9 billion each year in tobacco duty, dwarfing the £1.9 billion cost to the NHS of smoking-related illnesses, Telegraph analysis shows.
Compare that with the other so-called sin taxes. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, illnesses caused by obesity cost the health service £11 billion each year, yet the sugar tax raises around £350 million annually. Meanwhile, alcohol-related conditions are thought to cost the NHS £3.5 billion and £21 billion on society as a whole, but alcohol levies only raise £12.6 billion. So, in a crude way of calculating it, the country’s 6.4 million smokers are the only group that more than cover the cost of their vice.
And what costs they are. A pack of 20 now will set you back almost £16, up from £8.50 a decade ago, according to the Office for National Statistics, with more than 80 per cent of the cost being tobacco duty. Meanwhile, a British smoker now has to spend on average 11.2 per cent of their wages each year to support a pack-a-day habit – up from 5.8 per cent in 2008. That spend is well ahead of France on 10.9 per cent and Germany on just 5.5 per cent.
Britain already has some of the toughest smoking regulations in the world, causing a collapse in tobacco purchases, but Sunak wanted to toughen them further by copying former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s pledge to ban today’s 14-year-olds from ever legally buying cigarettes. The new Wellington government ditched the policy in February because it was too unwieldy, but still the UK continues to charge ahead.
Examples of places that have successfully introduced outdoor smoking prohibitions are few and far between, as they are so much more difficult to enforce than indoor bans. Milan outlawed lighting up at bus stops, taxi ranks, stadiums, parks and cemeteries in 2021, but its effectiveness is questionable. Just seven fines were issued in the first four months of the regulation.
Portuguese ministers have legislated to ban smoking under outdoor covered terraces, while the authorities in Turin banned outdoor smoking unless other people are at least five metres away in April – though you may smoke closer to others “with their explicit consent”. It is perhaps too soon to tell how well it has gone. But regardless of whether these serve as litmus tests, does anybody seriously think that a country like the UK, where shoplifters can basically get away with nicking up to £200-worth of goods at a time, has the resources to police who is smoking or vaping outdoors?
There is also a grim irony that we are now, in effect, being told that pub gardens full of smokers are dangerous places less than four years after we were told that they were the only safe way to enjoy going out during the pandemic. Is the chance of breathing in second-hand smoke outdoors more dangerous than Covid was in 2020? Prof Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, is said to approve of the proposed ban.
For a man who never misses the chance to be photographed in a pub clutching a pint, this new policy is an odd move for Starmer. No sooner had rumours of a potential ban emerged than the hospitality industry was up in arms, claiming it would be a significant hit to the beleaguered pub trade. In the decade after the last Labour government introduced the indoor smoking ban in 2007, some 10 per cent of pubs and nightclubs – about 7,000 – closed for good.
Even before his war on smokers, and despite his love of a beery photo op, Starmer was not the most popular figure with publicans. Jeremy Clarkson preemptively barred him from his new Cotswolds boozer when it opened last Friday, and he was thrown out of The Raven in Bath three years ago because of the proprietor’s opposition to coronavirus lockdown measures.
At The Pineapple, Starmer’s favoured watering hole near his north London home, the beer garden has ashtrays on each table, thick umbrellas and patio heaters to cater for smokers and outdoor diners alike. If the Prime Minister gets his way, the ashtrays will be cleared from the tables.
On Thursday lunchtime, the drinkers of Kentish Town were aghast at Starmer’s plans. “What’s next? Will they ask you to stop drinking too? It’s b——s,” says Colin Cruickshank, a 67-year-old facilities manager. “No one’s going to listen to that. You’d have to have a fag before you get to the pub, and then you’re f—-d after that.”
One can only wonder what Angela Rayner makes of it all, given that the most famous photograph of the now Deputy Prime Minister shows her taking a long, satisfying drag on a cigarette during a particularly stressful day at the 2021 Labour conference.
This should not be just a row about smoking. Rather, there is an important principle at stake: should consenting citizens be able to do things to themselves that are harmful? Or should they be told that the nanny state knows better? Tim Martin, the founder and chairman of JD Wetherspoon, put it well when he said that “the question is whether the Government should interfere in individual liberties where danger is involved”.
He added: “Mountaineering is dangerous, for example. Horse riding, statistically, causes many serious injuries. I don’t think it will have a big effect on our business, one way or the other, and is really a libertarian issue.”
Most depressing of all, the British public seems happy to be mindlessly told what to do, rather than make decisions for themselves. Pollsters have a joke: put the word “ban” in a polling question and it will boost the positive responses by 20 per cent. Polls conducted after Sunak’s plan for a “smoke-free generation” were announced showing that between two-thirds and three-quarters of people were in favour of it.
After Sunak announced his original ban, David Hockney, the great artist and legendary smoker of four Davidoff Magnums an hour, said that it proved to him there are “too many bossy people in England” – part of the reason why he now spends much of his time in Normandy.
“I started when I was 16 and I’m now 86 and I’m reasonably fine, thank you. I just love tobacco and I will go on smoking until I fall over,” he wrote. “Like trees, we are all different, and I’m absolutely certain I am going to die. In fact, I’m 100 per cent sure I’m going to die of a smoking-related illness or a non-smoking-related illness.”
Additional reporting by Ben Butcher