“Yeah, just a pack of straights please, mate. Actually, you know what, I may as well grab two of them.” Alice, a 51-year-old IT manager, is skulking outside her local off-licence. She can just about hear Evan, her long-time friend (and occasional romantic partner), trying to sound relaxed around the other side of the door. Soon Evan emerges, shooting Alice a triumphant look. He makes sure the man behind the till isn’t watching through the window, before sneaking one pack into Alice’s coat pocket. “I’ll pay you back,” she assures him, “commission included.” The year is 2061, and it pays to be 52. Your friends flock to you every time they run out of cigarettes.

 

I don’t think I’m alone in finding the whole idea of the ban slightly bemusing. Many have pointed out, given the growing support for the legalisation of cannabis, the possibility of hearing something along the lines: “I promise there’s no tobacco in this, officer. I swear I only smoke joints.” Maybe these scenarios are why I can’t take the smoking ban seriously.  Maybe I should try to feel otherwise. There is, after all, quite a lot at stake in this issue. For once it felt to me like both sides of a debate in Parliament had genuine, thought-out reasoning behind their stances.

 

On 16^th April, when the Tobacco and Vapes Bill passed its second reading in the Commons, its opponents were right to worry that the plan to permanently ban anyone born in or after 2009 from smoking would lead to a significant drop in tax revenue. Its defenders were equally right to point out that the money spent by the NHS on treating lung cancer patients is by no means trivial. It was hard not to argue that this sort of measure is overly paternalistic, and yet health secretary Victoria Atkins was (for a change) probably onto something in arguing that there is “no liberty in addiction.”

 

The reason for all the jokes about this bill, the weightless feeling of its discussion, is that people don’t actually believe the ban will happen. Once the issue expires from the news cycle, ready to make its slow progress through Committees and The Lords, surely the government won’t go through with it?

 

This is a government that had to give up on building a railway. They might have been justified in doing so, but the slow death of HS2 does raise a question about what, if anything, the British State can achieve when they couldn’t even do that. This is only the most notable in a litany of failures. The National Audit Office predicts that Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda scheme, which he is so desperate to have take up as much airtime and as many headlines as possible, will cost taxpayers around £1.8m per deportation. That’s assuming they manage to get any planes off the ground, which so far, so good, and so predictably, they haven’t.

 

Closer to home, anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the Oxbridge admissions system (or British Education in general) must have looked on with resignation when Liz Truss revealed her grand plan to force both Cambridge and Oxford to offer interviews to every student with 3 A*s at A-Level under their belt. Frankly, this was never going to happen, given the current timetable for UCAS and how independently the Colleges (let alone the Universities) operate. But the absurdity of suggesting the key site of government intervention to ensure educational equality should be over-achieving 18-year-olds can’t be lost on us either.  Government policy has become equivalent to placing ineffectual plasters on randomly chosen wrong wounds, but even this makes an assumption of benevolence that is increasingly tenuous. It’s getting harder and harder to think anything else: the government isn’t trying to help anyone—it’s all just smoke and mirrors. A shady, self-interested performance.

 

Whatever the root cause of this mess is (call it the gamification of politics; call it institutionalised incompetence; call it the lasting stench of Thatcherism), the smoking ban can be a moment for reflection. When was the last time the government tried something like this? For once, they have tasked themselves with the improvement of people lives. They have said, “I think it would be better if our society were somehow different.” Watching politicians make the case for a hill they are proud to stand on was a breath of fresh air.

 

We live in an era in which the very people at the top of the state believe that the state is fundamentally rubbish at everything. Dressed up in the language of fiscal responsibility and business-friendliness, we have witnessed further and further abdication of responsibilities until there is nothing left but a hollowed-out shell. Politicians are merely interpreters of realities beyond their control. They are captains bailing out a sinking ship, buffeted by waves between great unknowable shores.

 

The debate about the Smoking Ban reminds me a lot of the Covid debates. Perhaps it’s the differing effects on the young and old, or the push and pull between public health and individual choice. Either way, 2020 to 2022 represents a brief, nightmarish inversion of the long trend against government involvement in people’s lives. With climate change, automation, and demographic aging coming down the track, we are not past crises of magnitudes that feel impossible to face up to.

 

We can take an example from the Smoking Ban, though. It’s a chance to have a serious look in the mirror: at what we are doing, what we are facing. We can think about why we do the things we do in our society, and we can think about how, in ways we can actually imagine impacting each of our lives, we might do them differently. I’m not sure whether the Smoking Ban is the right idea, but at least it’s a substantial policy. Who knows? They might even follow through with it.∎

Words by Joseph Rodgers. Graphic courtesy of Alice Robey-Cave.