Never mind the quality of the benevolent concern, just feel the width of the legislation!

HMG is banning cigarettes for anyone born after 2008. Another stupid idea chugged out of the stupid idea factory — a facility belching smoke like a 60-a-day old git outside a betting shop. 

To be clear, anyone smoking cigarettes at any age is a fucking idiot. This includes my two sons who have heard me at excruciating, alienating length on this issue. And yes, I used to smoke a lot, and I was an idiot for that habit. Cigarette smoking kills roughly 50 per cent of long-term smokers. There is no excuse for smoking in the 21st century: we have all the information that we will ever need that smoking is a mug’s game. There were generations in the past who were told that cigarettes were good for the health, only later in life to be told that, oops, cigarettes were slow motion suicide. In terms of health, smoking is about as good for you as jumping in front of a moving train. The current generations cannot be said to be misled. They have all the information they need to *not* pick up that first cig.

And, yes, I know that 60-odd per cent of the British public think this cigarette ban is a good idea, which puts me among non-smokers in a probable minority of one. 

But, as usual, the legislation misses several big points. 

The first of which is: my life, my body — who the fuck are you to tell me what to do with myself? Isn’t informed adult consent one of the foundational principles of a free society?

If I know what an activity like smoking will do to me, and so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, surely it’s up to me. 

OK, yes, smoking can hurt other people; I have the right *not* to breathe your smoke and the activity should be conducted in secure or remote circumstances: in a hermetically sealed metal box fitted with perfectly efficient air filters (‘An iron lung!’ he exclaimed, getting excited at the irony of the thing) or in open space, in the universal void somewhere beyond Pluto because I don’t want to even catch a whiff of a hint of a smell of that shit. 

If I want to eat a mountain of sugar, swallow glass, stick pins in my eyes, or turn my brain to mush by listening to Keir Starmer, are these not my decisions? I agree they are all stupid and unadvisable activities but does that automatically mean they should be illegal?

Smoking is not the only matter of my-life-my-choice that is regulated or legislated. 

On the everyday, trivial scale, the sugar tax (Soft Drinks Industry Levy) isn’t a ban, but it’s a fiscal nudge that effectively penalises a personal dietary choice. Proposals to restrict HFSS (high fat, salt, sugar) food advertising, ban buy-one-get-one-free deals on junk food, and restrict meal sizing are all in various stages of policy development — paternalistic interventions in what people choose to eat.

Leaping up the ladder of consequentiality: assisted dying. If life is unbearable for one reason or another, why shouldn’t I have the right to end it? The pending Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Act gives only partial relief and leaves me the choice of living an unliveable life, spending a huge amount of money — and time in pain — to finish my life in another country, or sit in the bath with a bottle of painkillers and a razor blade, leaving some other poor soul the horror of finding me and cleaning up the mess. 

Drugs — or as I prefer to style it: DRUUUUUUUUGS! While cigarettes are objectively bad for you, there is considerable evidence (and personal experience) that cannabis and psychedelics (mushrooms and LSD) have physical and mental health benefits. So that ban is not even keeping me from self harm but is keeping me from something that might be good for me. 

Should you legislate doing the sensible thing?

It is meaningless to legislate being a good little girl or boy; you can’t legislate respect for your body because you reduce actions to empty obedience, you replace respect for your body with fear of the law. And you are impinging on Santa’s prerogative to decide who is naughty or nice.

I agree that banning cigarettes is tempting. But once you’ve accepted the principle of banning, of legislating behaviour, where do you go? How do you define risky activity? Who is to define it? If we leave the average politician or Whitehall panjandrum to decide risky for us, walking on a rucked carpet would bring an on-the-spot fine. Crossing the road is risky, so ban crossing the road — ban chickens who even look like they might want to cross the road! Slipping in the shower is one of the biggest causes of injury at home, so ban showering. Or, better still, ban slipping. Having a poo: if you have an aneurysm, the straining might make it rupture; ban pooping without first undergoing a whole-body CT scan. Many people might designate as a high risk activity what I used to define as an average Saturday night out. And so on.

But then consistency has never been a consideration in the policies of banning things. 

Here are some other things that are banned in the UK or may be banned: 

Protest. Successive governments, including this one, nominally headed by a nominal human rights lawyer, have put so many restrictions on public protest and free speech that it seems you are only allowed to voice your objections if whispered very quietly in a sealed box in the same outer reaches of the solar system to which I would like to confine smokers. The bans are highly selective. The result is that protesting about the genocide of the Palestinian people, any policy of the Israeli government, protesting environmental degradation, against corporations hoovering up our data, are highly restricted or outright banned. However, these restrictions don’t seem to apply in practice to displays of, for example, nationalism with their attendant implications of racism and antagonism. 

Trial by jury. In some cases this will be banned if Starmer and Lammy get their way, turning back a principle and practice that goes all the way back (in the UK, at least) to 1215 and Magna Carta.

And here are some things that are not banned:

• complicity and participation in the genocide of Palestinian people
• allowing foreign powers to use UK airbases to bomb Iranian people
• creating a digital panopticon with the aid of foreign big tech (Palantir, we see you!)
• corporations and super rich dodging taxes
• lobbying by corporations and repressive regimes to influence legislation
• ad infinitum

How did I get from a partial ban on cigarettes to civil liberties, the corporate takeover of everyday life, and genocide?

Simple. Bans aren’t about what’s good for us. Bans are about control. Notwithstanding the obvious, that the government is scoring easy popularity points with policies such as banning cigarettes to certain age groups, they are perpetuating the banning culture; first you ban one, then you ban whatever is inconvenient to you. Seemingly innocuous or uncontroversial bans such as the cigarette issue perpetuate the perception that bans aren’t necessarily bad things; they are for our own good. We, somehow, are collectively unable to make good decisions; bans reinforce the culture of us and them, ‘them’ being the authority that’s able to make better decisions for ‘us’. Notice how the controls are on the individual, and not on the corporates who are selling us toxic products or degrading the climate, and who seem to get a free pass. 

There has never been an item of legislation that potentially gives the government power over our lives that hasn’t been abused. You would think the laws enacted to deal with terrorism would be an uncontroversially good thing, yet, now, it seems that in the US and UK anyone who disagrees with the government can be — and is — labelled a terrorist.

Any government putting the concept of the citizen as an adult before its own lobbies and ulterior motives could try the boring old tactics of education and discussion. But to the paternalistic or authoritarian government that just wants to get its own way, banning stuff is addictive — and it reminds us of the real relationship between them and us. So next time someone offers you a ban, just say no.

This story was first published on Chris Page’s Substack psipook.substack.com