Nigel Farage has put the generational smoking ban on his list of laws to repeal if he becomes Prime Minister. In an article for the Telegraph, the Reform leader described the ban, which will prohibit anyone born after 2008 from ever buying tobacco products, as “plainly idiotic”, “unjust” and “utterly unworkable”. He is quite right, but his article — titled “Reform will repeal the generational smoking ban” — met with a hostile reception on Twitter (known to Elon Musk as X) from people who didn’t understand what he was talking about.
“Farage wants to bring smoking back to indoor public spaces because of course he does”, said one angry user. “Great, so back to pub visits being ruined by stinking smoke everywhere”, said another.
There was a great deal of this kind of thing. “I like not having to smell smoke while I’m in a pub”. “Do we want to go back to the times when going on a night out meant coming home stinking of other peoples smoke?” “I don’t want pubs filled with smoke again thanks.” “Blimey. Lost my vote now then. Don’t want to come out of a pub stinking.” And so on.
Some people voiced support for Mr Farage but did so from the same position of profound ignorance. “The day the smoking ban was introduced was the day freedom died in England”, opined one account. “Genuinely based policy”, said another. There was even support from a sensible centrist who asked: “I don’t smoke but if they had a designated smoking room in a pub then what’s wrong with that?”
These are not a few cherry-picked examples. The majority of people who held forth on the subject on social media completely misunderstood what was under discussion. Farage was not, alas, proposing the abolition of the ban on smoking in workplaces that was introduced nineteen years ago. He was advocating the future repeal of the weird, incremental prohibition on tobacco sales in the Tobacco and Vapes Bill that has not yet become law, let alone been implemented.
I have long suspected that most people don’t understand what the generational ban is, perhaps because it is too peculiar for them to get their heads around. When it was first mooted by Rishi Sunak, he focused on the age of the people who will be affected which, at the time, was 14 years or younger. Since no one thinks 14 year olds should be allowed to buy cigarettes, the ban struck casual observers as being nothing more than common sense. If anything, they were surprised that selling smokes to kids was not already illegal (it is, and has been since 1908). This confusion was not helped by slack journalism, such as the Guardian’s explanation in 2024 that the Tobacco and Vapes Bill “ensures anyone turning 15 from 2024, or younger, will be banned from buying cigarettes”.
I have noticed similar ignorance about the government’s plans for a vaping ban. I have brought this up in conversation with a number of friends who vape, all of whom had heard about it but none of whom understood what was at stake. The first person I mentioned it to listens to talk radio all day long but thought that it would only ban vaping in cars with kids. The next two people both thought that it had something to do with hospital entrances and nothing to do with pubs. The fourth person — who, like the others, was vaping in a pub at the time — hadn’t heard about it at all and regretted that it would mean she would have to give up pubs.
To be clear, the government is proposing banning vaping everywhere that smoking is banned, which means every pub, club, café, train platform, office and vape shop in the land. The confusion is perhaps forgivable because the government dropped a press release last month which focused on smoking outside hospitals and buried the bit about banning vaping. For some reason, every media outlet put the proposed ban on vaping in cars in the headline and downplayed the rest. There has been nothing more from the Department of Health and Social Care about it since. Wes Streeting has kept his head down and the usual gaggle of prohibitionist “public health” groups have been uncharacteristically quiet. The plan seems to be to slip this through with the minimum of publicity via secondary legislation until one day vapers wake up and find that the ground has shifted beneath their feet.
Something similar will happen in 2027 when the BBC gleefully tracks down the first cohort of 18 year olds who cannot legally buy tobacco, pipes, bongs or Rizlas. The same thing happened on a small scale this year when people discovered that a ban on buy-one-get-one-free offers on “junk food” meant that they could no longer get free refills of hot chocolate and Mocha. There will be a certain amount of incredulity and a slew of social media posts along the lines of “WTF?!” but it will be too late to do anything about it.
Government by opinion poll is bad enough when the public are reasonably well informed, but on these and many other issues, the average person is completely clueless about legislation that is being drafted and only has a vague idea about the legislation that already exists. There is no reason to expect people to be better informed — rational ignorance is perfectly logical, especially when it comes to niche issues — but having a population that doesn’t have a bloody clue about policy becomes a problem when pollsters are constantly asking them what they think. On vaping regulation, in particular, most people’s opinions are worthless because they think that vaping is as bad, if not worse, than smoking. Pressure groups systematically misinform the public and then commission polls to have the misinformation spewed back to them in a feedback loop of useless opinions that is then used to guide policy-makers. That’s not democracy. It’s an AI hallucination.
