Labour, law and libertarians

In an interview with The Times published on Saturday Labour's shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said he is ready to take on the libertarian right over smoking.

I have news for him. The libertarian right, such as it is, has largely given up defending the right to smoke.

Today they’re more interested in supporting vaping as the free market ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of smoking.

Or promoting the legalisation of cannabis which is way more trendy than tobacco even if many users choose to smoke it.

But when it comes to defending the practice of smoking tobacco you can often hear a pin drop.

According to The Times, which only recently ran a leading article (‘Stub it out’) supporting New Zealand style policies to achieve a ‘smoke free’ England by 2030:

New Zealand has introduced a law which means that nobody now under the age of 14 will ever be permitted to buy cigarettes, and [Streeting] is interested in doing something similar here.

That was on Saturday. The next morning Streeting appeared on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg (BBC One). Labour, he confirmed, ‘would consult on banning the sale and purchase of cigarettes as part of a “radical” package of measures to stamp out smoking’.

Mea culpa, I was unaware of the Kuenssberg interview and Streeting’s comments until Sunday afternoon when I saw they had been widely reported online.

Forest’s reaction was therefore too late for those reports, many of which were generated (I think) by the Press Association which, not for the first time, didn’t bother to contact Forest for a response.

We did belatedly get some comments out there (here, here and here, for example) and yesterday I did a couple of interviews, one on BBC Radio Ulster, the other on TalkTV, but from the free market/libertarian right all I could see and hear was silence, even on social media.

The notable exception was a post by Alex Singleton (The nanny state of it all) on the ASI blog. Alex writes:

In a free country, people should have the freedom to take part in activities that affect themselves without having hectoring moralisers try to use the power of the state to prevent them.

Far from creating “new Tobacco Control Plan”, politicians should realise that they have already gone too far by preventing smoking rooms in pubs, and abandon the ludicrous, moralising “smokefree by 2030” agenda, which is an attack on people’s free choice and would just expand criminal activity.

A little over 20 years ago Alex co-founded the Liberty Club at St Andrews University. Having gone to school in St Andrews I leapt at the chance to speak to the group and I remember the occasion with fondness.

But I was only one of many who made that pilgrimage. Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox), director of the Academy of Ideas which runs the annual Battle of Ideas, was another.

Claire, I think, would consider herself to be on the libertarian left (a term that some people on the right used to sneeringly consider an oxymoron) but in my experience the libertarian left is far truer to the spirit of the word than their counterparts on the right who are more driven by market trends than libertarian or even classical liberal principles.

Anyway, thank goodness for individuals like Alex Singleton who have stayed true to the libertarian values they espoused when they were younger.

As I have always said, supporting the rights of smokers - even if you don’t smoke yourself - is the true test of a genuine liberal.

Abandon the rights of adults who choose to smoke and you abdicate the right to call yourself a liberal, let alone a libertarian.

As for Wes Streeting’s comments, I don’t think we should be too alarmed just yet. Labour, after all, isn’t even in power.

Nevertheless, when politicians fly a kite to see what reaction they get it’s best not to ignore it. Just saying.

See also: End of the cigarette? Labour unveil plan to wipe out smoking by 2030 by banning sale of tobacco (LBC)

C-stores slam Labour’s proposal to consult on cigarette sales ban (Convenience Store)

Campaigners slam threat to ban UK cigarette sales (Tobacco Reporter)

Below: The Liberty Club of St Andrews on No Smoking Day, 2002