The BBC recently published a long investigation into the growing issue of illegal cigarette sales on Britain’s high streets. With ever-climbing taxes on tobacco, instead of quitting, smokers are increasingly buying cheaper black market cigarettes imported from abroad or counterfeited. It risks their health while revealing the hollowness of the government’s claim to be protecting smokers through taxation.
Nanny statism, the desire to stamp out undesirable habits in others, is at the heart of Britain’s illicit tobacco problem. Paternalism has permeated British culture. Many non-smokers are against the freedom to consume lifestyle products such as cigarettes, vapes, and nicotine pouches without state interference. 57% of people surveyed by YouGov in 2021 support an outright ban on cigarettes.
Indeed, many non-smokers see smoking not as a personal choice but a vice to be banned, not tolerated. Far from acting as a neutral arbiter, the state encourages these opinions by increasingly treating smokers not as autonomous citizens, but as public burdens to be coerced, excluded, and taxed into submission. This strategy only serves to bully smokers into further black-market tobacco usage.
Living in a free society means allowing people to enjoy leisure activities which can be unhealthy without condemnation from on high. When prohibition hit the USA, although alcohol consumption dropped, deaths from unregulated alcohol rose due to the black market. The same is true of smoking in Britain today.
The smoker routinely suffers discrimination at the hands of the state. Policies aim to price people out of their nicotine consumption. Take disposable vape bans, which force vapers – a much healthier choice than smoking, and a great tool for quitting cigarettes – to invest in a more expensive vape.
The state has come to rely on smokers as a cash cow. Their consumption taxes keep climbing. Unfortunately, as the tax rate increases, more people turn to illicit vendors, who unsurprisingly don’t pay tax. The heavy tax burden on cigarettes cost the treasury an estimated £1.4 billion last year as people turned to black-market cigarettes rather than taxed and regulated ones. Smoking needs regulation, but to tax and regulate it so harshly that many turn to the black market is counterproductive.
Being a liberal means defending a person’s right to smoke. It’s a personal choice which the state should not take out of individuals’ hands through pricing-out or excessive regulation hampering their use. Public health messaging by the government once aimed to campaign against asymmetry of information regarding tobacco and nicotine products, like the ‘smoking kills’ campaign from 2003. It now manifests itself in a more aggressive form of paternalism, ramping up taxation on cigarettes and attempting to achieve a ‘smoke-free generation’ by state-mandated means, rather than encouraging vaping, nicotine pouch or gum usage in their communications to the public.
Legislation aimed at banning tobacco outright is a bad idea. The state receives substantial tax revenue from smoking in Britain; removing it would leave a considerable hole in government finances. More importantly, there is no coherent policy on unhealthy goods. For example, junk food consumed in high quantities can cause obesity, the biggest cause of cancer. Despite this, few would support putting smoking-level taxes (around 80% of the item’s price) on burgers and doughnuts. Smokers are singled out. They face an existential threat from ‘smoke-free generation’ rhetoric and increasing sin taxes on behaviours the state now believes should not be part of modern British society.
Today, smoking bans do not only exist to dissuade smoking in public. They function to demonise smokers as modern-day lepers. The government increasingly portrays smoking as immoral and inherently dangerous to the people around you. The health secretary himself argued that there is “no freedom in addiction”, painting smokers as slaves to tobacco and unable to make choices themselves.
This is a gross overreaction to something which manifests itself as either a quiet, pensive act or an actively sociable one. Campaigns by organisations such as ASH have transformed government communications over smoking into a secular puritanism, less about wellbeing and more about the eradication of all smoking.
The modern smoker is aware of the harmful effects of tobacco but chooses to smoke anyway. Photos of diseased lungs on cigarette packets end the myth that smokers don’t know the health effects of their habit, as studies have proven. The methodology for making it harder to smoke through extortionate taxation no longer holds up to scrutiny and pushes consumers towards the black market.
If the state continues looking to ban, legislate against, and demonise everything associated with smoking, the black market will only grow. Legally supplied cigarettes with moderate levels of taxation provide money for the government and necessary health regulation, where illegal counterfeit cigarettes do not. By supposedly prioritising public health over real solutions, like encouraging smokers to switch to reduced-harm products such as vapes, ministers instead risk further harming the lives of those they are trying to protect.
In short, smokers are more in touch with their bodies than the politicians regulating them. This kind of encroachment serves only to drain public finances, alienate smokers, and undermine an individual’s right to enjoy a smoke break. We should let the government get on with solving real health crises in this country. It should leave smokers the right to smoke.
Ted Newson is a political commentator with Young Voices UK.
