The UK prime minister Rishi Sunak announced in the 2023 Conservative Party conference which was held in the city of Manchester that he agreed to implement an incremental tobacco purchase ban which would raise and gradually increase the minimum age required to buy tobacco by one year every year until eventually no one would be of legal age to buy tobacco because the last to be in this position would die and the people living after us would end up not being able to decide to smoke.
Immediately before the people living after us would not hypothetically be entitled to smoke, because that would also depend on them and their actions, cigarettes would have been available in the shops for the dead with no one else being entitled to buy them out and they would not be made available after that would have been ascertained. This is what is being planned as the future of our nation.
Rishi Sunak justified this position which was probed from him from antismoking proponents, just like they did with Jane Ellison who was health minister in 2016 and plain packaging she passed alone through parliament under the disagreement of the prime minister who was then David Cameron, by declaring that the biggest cause of preventable illness and death would effectively be prevented and that no one who even smokes want their children to take it up for themselves. He said that it would be the decision that would save most lives more than anything else that can be decided by him, one-sidedly by the government and the parliament with no active opposition by the rest of the people who are involved and affected.
Since then the incremental tobacco purchase ban that is included in the Tobacco and Vapes Bill has had its first reading through parliament in the House of Commons on the 20th of March after it was announced in the King’s Speech during the state opening of parliament, and its second reading has been planned for the 16th of April 2024. The overwhelming form of restriction amounting to what can be described as adult smoking prohibition was reversed in New Zealand from where it originated on the 13th of December 2022 by the recently elected three-party coalition government, and it has been declared unconstitutional by the Malaysian judiciary, but Rishi Sunak all along had already made up his mind.
The solution and answer are simple: If you don’t want to get cancer, you don’t want to catch a smoking-related disease, you simply don’t smoke under your own initiative, under which you can quit smoking and watch your health restore itself within the next month or so and your lungs will have cleared out in a matter of months from not smoking again. If you don’t want to get sick because of smoking, you don’t smoke, which is better than smoking and getting punished for it from the law. Nobody wants to lose their money to a fine, so why should they be in favour of that happening to the rest or being possible for themselves? It would make very bad sense! Why should you choose to be subjected to the possibility of paying a large fine if you can avoid that by being free at the same cost and balance? Deciding not to smoke on your own is better than smoking because you can and getting punished for it from the law. It is also preferable to being subjected to the same possibility.
After the prime minister was persuaded by antismoking proponents external to the government that this would be right in his opinion, to punish a well-intentioned innocent everyday life activity of purchasing tobacco after becoming an adult, and he also said that he knows not all in the same room where the Conservative Party conference was held would agree with him, the issue was declared publicly and received extensive coverage and debate in the media, and was discussed in an open manner across platforms such as the BBC, GB News and Sky News, with many conflicting opinions being voiced and heard and different experiences coming from different people who were describing them on air becoming wider known and coming to our attention.
It happened in the best possible way that this issue was in particular discussed by so many people ideally for a democratic and free society, especially if the topic of discussion was replacing the question of whether to have an open choice to smoke with that of whether you should not be allowed to do so by somebody else and be punished for it. This latter option which no logical person would prefer for themselves relies on allowing the purchase of tobacco exclusively to those who are adults only at the present time, retrospectively in relation to when the law would be passed. Those who are already adults at the time of the enactment of the law will still be eligible to purchase tobacco, but those who become adults after the law has been enacted despite of the fact will not be. Why? The criterion is because they were born after 2009, which enacts discrimination against them and the generation they belong to, which is not a proactive characteristic of any person. It would violate the right of young people to make that choice by themselves when they acquire their legal responsibility, and it potentially displaces the local population further away towards another country where that could happen if they so choose, not allowing them to live in the first place and not allowing them to live in their country.
Acquiring legal responsibility at the age of 18 means that you are a responsible citizen from then and that you can exercise your own judgement and criticism on a number of different decisions. You must certainly be entitled to smoke then instead of when you were younger. It is well expected that young teenagers and children can definitely not buy tobacco on their own, and that happens by law for the same reason of this legal requirement. This does not identify with raising that minimum age as a variable instead of a constant of 16, 18 or 21 to tackle smoking as a social problem of the general health of the population because it should only exist for younger people and cover the prevention and deterrence of underage smoking, which is the point and the only reason of setting the age limit. If the age limit does not have this functional scope in society, then it must not be present at all as a manipulated variable that takes advantage of the existence of the law to punish what is possible for you to do on your own.
What is possible for you to do on your own is also punished by the very first smoking ban itself and most other counter-smoking legislation that was dictated to those being addressed by those addressing it. The parliament can only say yes or no to the non-negotiable nature of dictated commands and instructions issued to the public without the ability to define them instead of the dictator posed as the government who has decided about the content of the law that got dictated to the public. Therefore, they cannot effectively represent those who elected them and can only decide about what has been decided for themselves and decide the same thing for everyone else, since smoking is self-sustainable and makes no use of another person to be acted upon.
While one distinction consists of what is dictated versus what has logical consequence, reasoning and common sense made out of it, one other distinction consists of what has been agreed upon by society in advance under the consent of its members and what has been decided by the state without society. All other laws except counter-smoking legislation have been decided by society and the state and not by the state on its own. And all other laws except counter-smoking legislation and previously imposed COVID restrictions are transposing preapproved social rules on paper and apply them in practice by enforcing them onto the same society which decided on them and its members. However, the same does not happen in the absence of society arbitrarily by the selective choice of one single person or individual.
There is no point in not being able to choose whether to smoke when you can choose not to for your own benefit catering after your own interest, and there is no point in not being eligible to smoke for the rest of your life until you die in the same way that you got born, because that was happening when you got born and should not become the way that you will live the rest of your life. And it moreover should not be an imposed condition on anybody’s life that we eventually die as materialising expressions such as “for the rest of their life” or “will never be allowed to”. All this equates to the same fact that people must not be treated as children in the same way that children cannot be treated as the adults who were born after 2009, especially not by the confrontation of the law and on this particular topic.
This Conservative government that believes in freedom of choice, consumer rights, because it is the right of the consumer to choose whether to smoke from what is available in the market, and personal responsibility, had better not condemn the entire nation and its population to what is better favoured by the main opposition party and leave open ends meet with each other.
SCRAP THE SMOKING BAN 