Puff The Magic Dragon

Cigarettes are indefensible. But defend them we must.

I loved to smoke. I mean, love, love, loved it. I could smoke a cigarette in the shower. While I was washing my hair. Working on the Big Breakfast in the 90s I could have already puffed my way through ten Rothmans long before the show went on air. At 7am.

But after wheezing my way through my twenties I finally saw the light and ditched cigarettes in my early thirties. Turning to more healthy pursuits. Like drinking a bottle of wine a night. But that is another story.

It wasn’t just me. Smoke sales, like their yellow fingered, black lunged devotees, have been looking increasingly unhealthy for years. Especially since lighting up was banned from popular venues like pubs, upstairs on buses, and outside the front of most hospitals.

And now there’s another nail in the coffin of coffin nails.

Wes Streeting, the Shadow (‘On me lungs? I’ve been eaten away. This is the end of me!’) Health Secretary has opened the door, to shutting the door on cigarette sales completely, by 2030. It’s not quite Labour Policy yet, but you can bet it will be.

Who is Wes Streeting? Well he’s the Labour politician all the cool kids are raving about. He’s an Ilford lad, pretty down to earth, inoffensive of face, and very electable. He’s like Keir Starmer, but if Keir Starmer was capable of spontaneous laughter.  Or a bit like a Tony Blair that no one wants to try for a war crime. Albeit one with the weird glassy eyes of a shop soiled Tiny Tears.

Wes comes across as a genuinely smart and likeable sort of chap, no wonder his party likes him, especially since he also has the knack for presenting the most Malthusian and misanthropic potential public health policies in a reasonable, common sense light.

In an interview with the BBC, Wes justifies an outright ban on cigarettes by pointing out that ‘The New Zealand government are doing it’.

Great. So if the New Zealand government put its head in the oven you’d do that too would you Wes?

Maybe it’s worth pointing out that New Zealand’s recent draconian public healthcare policies have been so successful that their sainted Prime Minister, Radio 4 favourite and economy tanker, Jacinda Ardern, has just elected to throw in the towel, rather than face the wrath of an ungrateful electorate. That’s assuming of course that she had planned to let them out of their houses long enough to actually vote.

But this isn’t about bashing the Labour Party. This isn’t a party political thing at all. It’s a class thing. And let’s remember that when it comes to talking down to the plebs, the Tories have long been in a class of their own. It’s pretty clear that should a future Labour government introduce such a ban, the Tories would not for a nano second, stand in their way.

No. This is about bashing the censorious sanctimonious prigs who feel it is their holy mission to take away all the things you enjoy in life, and replace them with a safe and sustainable, sugar free, Greta Thunberg branded joyless quorn substitute instead, you know, for your own good.

But hang on, what’s the problem? As I’ve already pointed out, practically no one smokes these days. At least no one who counts. Current estimates are less than 15% of people currently enjoy puffing on a cancer stick. But of course that 15% is not spread evenly across 100% of the population.

According to anti fag fanboys ASH, manual workers and the long term unemployed smoke like chimneys, while Managerial and Professional types, coincidentally, the sort of people who like going round banning other people from doing stuff, hardly smoke at all.

Weird huh?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of cigarettes. Selling a product which kills its customers makes about as much sense as shutting down the NHS for two years to protect cancer patients. And you wouldn’t find people standing out in the streets, banging pots and pans in support of that sort of nonsense now would you?

And while we’re on the subject of the NHS. There’s already a concerted effort to blame the failures of our national health service on the patients who use it. There might be a narrative that the health service is only collapsing because of fat people and smokers.

But it isn’t true.

Also by paying around £13 in tax every time they buy a pack of twenty, and conveniently dying before they get that tax money back in the form of a triple locked pension, I suspect on balance coughers actually make a net contribution to NHS coffers. Counter intuitively, at these levels of taxation there’s an argument that the more smokers we have, the better the health of the health service.

Maybe. If we really want to save the NHS, we should encourage children to spark up.  Yes of course it’s a crazy idea.  But only about as crazy as some of the clearly harmful and venal policies imposed on our children in schools, and more importantly, not in schools-stay home save lives-over the last few years.

Also, I’m not sure that creating a massive new cigarette smuggling industry would be a brilliant use of government resources.  And I expect the only way the police would agree to get involved, is if the government made flogging fags a hate crime, and worked out a way to sell them on Twitter.

Cigarettes are hard to defend. And that’s the idea. Because it’s difficult to defend an individual’s right to choose to do something, when that something is likely to kill them. But I’m not defending cigarettes, I’m defending choice. That’s a big difference.

They don’t really want to take away your cigarettes at all. They want to take away your right to choose to smoke them. And for you to nod along sagely while they do it.

Cigarettes are just a super convenient stepping stone. Because once they have persuaded you that you have no right to choose to smoke cigarettes, then it’s a much easier sell, to persuade you that you have no right to make a whole suite of other choices.

They are pitch rolling, softening us up to this idea, by initially targeting the products and activities that are very hard, if not impossible, to defend.

Cigarettes cause cancer. So we are going to take away your right to smoke them. The internet is full of porn and pedos, so were going to take away your right to freely access it. Cars cause emissions that clog up kiddie’s lungs, so we’re going to take away your right to drive them. Old films show racist and outdated depictions of black people. So you will no longer be allowed to watch them.

What’s your problem? I mean no one likes pedos right? And kiddies lungs are absolutely adorable. And why the hell do you want to watch Live and Let Die anyway? Unless you are a racist. Are you a racist? Because watching Live and Let Die is the sort of thing that only a racist would want to do. Racist.

Banners gotta ban. And so we stand back from the barricades and let them get on with it. After all, they’re only banning the bad stuff.

And then one day you wake up and find that you can’t go and meet your mates down Maccy D’s later because you have exceeded this months Sensible Meat Allocation, and so the CBDC app on your phone won’t let you buy any more, and anyway, you have run out of travel vouchers that allow you to leave your 15 Minute Village, and besides your handy and convenient, (take back control) smart meter is telling you that you have a Two Room Dual Heating Subsidy to pay, from that time you accidentally left the radiators on in two rooms at the same time, but no biggie, you probably can’t afford a Big Mac now anyway, since they brought in the 85% anti obesity burger tax.  You know, for the sake of the children.

If you think that this is a ridiculous Q Anon ‘right wing’ conspiracy fable, then think back over the last three years. When sitting on a bench was criminalised and going for a run ‘too far’ from your own house could land you in court. It only remains my dystopian fantasy, because they haven’t yet managed to make it, our dystopian reality.

Lockdown has given the public health fun vacuums, the sweet, sweet high of total control, and now, they are addicted to it.

Watching while we dutifully queued outside the supermarket,  masked up our toddlers, (shudder), and dobbed in our neighbours, opened up an entire world of possibilities. They learned that instead of resisting, we’d literally clap along with their efforts to control our lives and remove our choices.

When it comes to public health and personal freedom cigarettes are like the Nazis in the Free Speech argument. Impossible to defend on their own but absolutely vital to the principle. No one likes Nazis, but once you take away their right to speak, you’ve taken away everyone’s. Because you’ve let someone else, an authority which does not necessarily have your best interests at heart, decide who gets to speak (them), and who doesn’t (you).

Once you prevent people from buying cigarettes because they’re bad for them, you can prevent people buying anything if you can claim it’s, you know, for their own good.

Smoking stinks, but it’s not cigarettes the ever growing band of busy bodies want to stub out. It’s your right to choose for yourself.

Resist them.

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There is a brilliant and moving defence of free speech from Ira Glasser on Spiked here

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