Comment: How the nanny state survived the ‘big society’
Even in the midst of the ‘big society’, the war on smokers survives.
By Ian Dunt
Everywhere you look, the state is in retreat – and not always in a good way. For every civil liberty restored, we also find equality laws rolled back, consumer protections smoked out and social welfare spitefully reduced. That’s the ‘big society’ – you, on your own, in the free market. But somehow, inexplicably, the nanny state has survived.
Health secretary Andrew Lansley has confirmed he’s considering banning tobacco packaging. Perhaps he’s trying to win back doctors after he mocked Jamie Oliver’s healthy food campaigns. Regardless, his comments – selectively delivered to the Guardian – are proof that the nanny state is still making a healthy living as the role of government subsides.
The decision on banning the packaging – a move already undertaken in Australia – is justified, as usual, by stressing how attractive it is to children. There’s really a very easy answer to that argument, which is that children shouldn’t be smoking at all, so their view of the product is frankly irrelevant. We already have a law for that.
Banning a company from using packaging on the basis of the impact on children is like going back to the bad old days of BBFC censorship of ‘video nasties’. The BBFC soon changed its spots and stopped disrespecting the public. It got tough on films that had a U, PG, 12 or 15 certificate and eased up on 18 certificate films. That was sensible. Protect children, protect the freedom of adults – it’s a simple equation.
Lansley’s suggestion on cigarette packaging takes us back to that festering, brutalising strain of argument, which limits adult freedom through reference to children. It’s a fairly common weapon (“Think of the children!”).
Given that they are our future, children have something of a debilitating influence on our discourse. So many draconian measures are imposed through reference to them that I sometimes start to resent their abstract role in politics. Children are the political equivalent of a crude plot device, utilised without justification when you want to crack down on an adult’s freedom. That’s what paternalism really means: smudging the legislative dividing line between those who cannot give consent and those who can.
“The evidence is clear that packaging helps to recruit smokers, so it makes sense to consider having less attractive packaging,” Lansley said, inanely. “It’s wrong that children are being attracted to smoke by glitzy designs on packets.”
Here’s the British Medical Association (BMA) giving essentially the same message: “There is clear evidence that young people find packaging appealing. And we know that the tobacco industry spends huge amounts on this clever marketing to enhance their brands and increase sales.”
It’s like a tsunami of foolishness. How kind of these wise people to point out to us that packaging has an effect on consumers. I always thought corporations were doing it for the giggles. After all, it’s so unlike them to do something specifically because it earns them more money. Also note the way the language is framed around some fairytale characterisation of tobacco companies. “Clever marketing”, the BMA says, as if tobacco execs were sneering villains in white coats calculating our doom. Packaging is not clever marketing. It is just marketing. Everyone does it.
Now seems as good a point as any to admit that I quit smoking this summer. A few years back, I had a chat with a doctor friend who informed me, in the rather charming, accurate way doctors talk when drinking, that the average healing period of a human lung is about seven years. The trick is to quit seven years before you hit your cancer period. So get it done by 28 and you should – should – get away scot free. One day last summer I woke up with flu and didn’t feel like smoking. I saw the opportunity to quit and I took it.
I do not feel more healthy. I notice, in passing, that some people stink of smoke. That’s interesting. Apart from that, my sense of smell is as before, which, as a Londoner, is a good thing. I don’t have to shiver in the cold anymore. But I also don’t have that useful natural breaker in social situations which stepping outside for a fag gives you. I feel as if one of life’s small, hard-to-define pleasures has been taken from me, that sensation of doing something not for sustenance or intellectual or artistic appreciation, but simply for the sensual pleasure it gives you.
The point is: I chose. As an adult, I sometimes choose to do things which harm me. I sometimes choose the other way, and trade short-term pleasure for long-term gain. I choose a greasy burger or perhaps a salad. Perhaps we’ll go on an extreme sports holiday (unlikely), or go walking in Devon (equally unlikely). This ability to assess data and make an informed choice, at your own risk, is a fundamental aspect of being an adult, of being an informed member of the public in a civilised and free society.
Plainly children are not capable of this, and in actual fact I would support greater protections for under-18s, including a ban on all advertising, no matter how harmless the product. Children are too young to comprehend that what is being said to them is not from a reliable source, and the use of toy advertising in particular is detrimental and morally unjustified. It also happens to make parents’ live unbearable.
But the use of children to justify restrictions on adults is a sordid way to pressure for political change. We are witnessing another little battle in the gradual chipping away of smokers’ freedom. This process will continue until the stage is set for the debate the health lobby really wants to have – that of criminalisation.
The health lobby has no respect for the public, or its freedom to make decisions.
It says something about its strength that a government which plans to end funding for school sports, scrap Consumer Focus and cut housing benefit for those who fail to find a job still finds some room for the state intervention it demands. It’s insane that it should survive while compassionate, logical state intervention becomes extinct.
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