cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/13758125
Rishi Sunak suffers blow to his authority as 57 of his own MPs vote against his plan and over 100 abstain
Archived version: https://archive.ph/FWHhy
The House of Commons voted by 383 to 67 in favour of the prime minister’s plan to make it illegal for anyone born in 2009 or later to buy tobacco products in the UK.
Well that’s good to see. It passed by a big majority. Only the utterly insane votes against.
I feel like I’m living on a completely different planet right now.
I’m really surprised to see that this tobacco ban has so many supporters on all sides of the political spectrum. I am also surprised to see so many people on Lemmy supporting this…
I’m all for making corpos squirm, especially ones which create products that are designed to be addictive (e.g. big tobacco). But let’s not go around pretending that these businesses are the only victims of substance bans. For one, substance bans are always disproportionately applied to vulnerable minority groups.
Furthermore, folks who are motivated enough to acquire these substances despite bans will be more vulnerable to exploitation and adverse health effects than they already are. Big tobacco already does a great job of harming and exploiting folks. But at least we can regulate and monitor them. The customer can know with greater certainty exactly what each cigarette contains, you don’t get that privilege when acquiring substances illegally. You can also be fairly confident as to the affordability of legal substances versus getting fleeced for your entire income by a dealer who knows personally just how addicted you are.
If nothing else, this is going to end up as a massive waste of time. It is a fools errand to ban substances, and history has shown this time and time again. I do not see any evidence that we have learned from history, of what we will be doing differently to make this work when it has failed in the past. This ban will not last more than a few years at most.
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.
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 dad was a doctor for decades, working in oncology, and he was noticing that NHS budgets were struggling with so many people not dying of smoking related diseases.
If people live longer then they end up developing more complex diseases and degenerative conditions which are even more expensive for the NHS; requiring round the clock care, etc.
If imagine your dad would have wanted people to live longer healthier lives due to not smoking and being fitter rather than longer unhealthy lives with complications at a later age due to smoking.
Or did he just want people to die younger to reduce the burdon on the NHS budget? Something tells me that’s not what he would have wanted 😅.
It would be nihilistic to encourage smoking just because it saved the NHS money. He was just pointing out that there was an irony that people who died younger ended up taking less out of the NHS than those who lived longer, healthier lives.
Edit: I guess there are other examples of paradox like situations in public policy too. For example it is good for the individual if they save money but bad for the economy as a whole. Having too many savers can lead to a situation like Japan where people immediately save any economic stimulus they are given, so it doesn’t stimulate the wider economy.
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.
I think this post just made me realise how fucking stupid the censoring is on lemmy.ml. it removed the word f.a.g.
I really hate swear censors. They’re sucking fupid.
American censorship is the worst! Let us have our quaint british expressions for discussing cigarettes
Unfortunately, on general instances they aren’t going to allow it and rightly so as it stops a lot of abuse.
Was being a bit tongue in cheek there. It makes sense as a practicality of keeping the discourse civil.
We do have language filters here but, because if the divergence of the English language, we allow for British English usage like “fags” for cigarettes, “faggots” for the delicious food (also bundles of wood but that doesn’t come up often) and “cunt” or the Scottish would get half their messages censored. However, with great powers comes great responsibility, so we expect people not to take the piss. Also “piss” is allowed.
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.
That’s not new legal precedent. Grandfather laws have been a thing for a while.
That’s interesting - I always understood those as applying to businesses instead of individuals.
That’s not new. Literally exists on laws for towing trailers depending on when your licence was obtained. My dad and I have the same type of driving licence, but he can tow trailers with his because it was gotten before 2000 or something
🤓
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A ban on smoking for future generations moved a step closer last night, but Rishi Sunak suffered a blow to his authority after dozens of Conservative MPs voted against it.
The legislation, which would effectively ban smoking for future generations by raising the legal age every year, is seen by the prime minister’s allies as a key part of his political legacy.
However the result, voted against by 57 Tory MPs – including Kemi Badenoch, a likely future leadership contender, and five other ministers – underlined the depth of division within the party even over Sunak’s flagship policies.
Opposition to the plans was led by the former prime minister Liz Truss, who told the Commons she was “very concerned” it was “emblematic of a technocratic establishment in this country that wants to limit people’s freedom”.
The Guardian revealed this week that tobacco firms were lobbying politicians to oppose the legislation and instead support raising the smoking age from 18 to 21 in an attempt to avoid an outright ban.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, told the Commons: “Of all the policies the Conservatives have adopted from the Labour party in the past few years, nothing shows our dominance in the battle of ideas more than this latest capitulation.
The original article contains 991 words, the summary contains 209 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
