UK Politics

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I've said this elsewhere but the main thing I'm uncomfortable about is the new legal precedent being set where there are two classes of adult being created. It doesn't seem right that one group of people over the age of 18 ought to have more legal rights than another.

I really think people are overreacting to this.

The ban is of tobacco products to people born after a certain date. They'll still be able to get nicotine products, like vapes. Kids are already moving to vapes and they're significantly less deadly (and crucially less of a burden on the NHS).

This policy just ensures the generation shift away from smoking tobacco. It's a good thing.

I can respect the position that it's the individual's right to choose to smoke if that's what you're getting at?

But I'd love for that to come with the individual's responsibility to take care of their own health care for smoking related issues. I don't particularly want to be paying for the (poor) health choices of smokers that disproportionately clogg up our NHS. I totally accept that is a rather radical idea and hard to enforce which is why I am in favour of phasing out smoking in the way suggested by this bill.

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/statistics-on-public-health/2023

I'd much rather spend public money on making it easier and cheaper to access a proper gym and get people hooked on exercise instead.

My take on it is that nicotine is in a weird class of it's own. Alcohol and drugs at least do something for you, nicotine doesn't. People don't start smoking because they want to get off their head they do so largely due to things like peer pressure. After that, all you are doing is servicing an addiction and it is quite an addiction - I know a few former heroin addicts and they all say it was harder to give up cigarettes because the addiction is strong but also cigarettes are (or were ubiquitous). I know plenty of people who gave up smoking only to get drunk, be offered a ciggie or two, go to the fag machine and they are back on the treadmill. The smoking ban really helped with this and, as an asthmatic non-smoker I noticed my lungs improve to the point where I effectively don't have asthma. I see the rolling smoking ban as being an extension of this.

The rolling nature of the ban does mean enforcement is going to be tricky but it seems the right way to do it compared to an outright ban which would leave a lot of people in the lurch and prey to back street cigarette merchants (although with the tax on them now, the poorer smokers are already there - I know someone who admits they smoke blag bifters which caused general horror amongst everyone when they found out. He's since cut down as he was diagnosed as having the early stages of COPD).

I also think it's the right thing to do as I've seen the damage it does: my grandfather (10 Capstan Full Strength from the age of 9) was dying of lung cancer when pneumonia (the Old Man's Friend) got him, my cousin's husband (whose mum used to leave out a bottle of beer and a ciggie for him when he came home from school for lunch) had brutal surgery for lung cancer only to be taken by all the secondaries lung cancer throws out, my uncle.died in 2019 with COPD as the primary cause, I've had friends with throat cancer and the list goes on. When I was in the leg department at hospital and was shuffled between a few wards, I was surprised to find that everyone else in there smoked and had poorly controlled diabetes - address that and you could almost clear a floor of the hospital and that's not taking into account all the people in the cancer and heart wards who are there largely for smoking.

Will it last? I hope it does and the cross-party support gives me hope that changes of government won't see the laws scrapped. It's telling that the new NZ government rescinded the law because they needed the tax income to fund tax cuts. It's noteworthy that it didn't enjoy cross-party support (it was on the insistence of a coalition partner) and that medical professionals reckoned reversing the law would hit the Maori hardest.