Keir Starmer made me take up smoking

Sifting for new ideas at the bottom of an ashtray

ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO, the (alleged) philosopher and High Tory kitchen-mop-imitator Roger Scruton was paid £4,500 per month to smuggle references to cigarettes and smoking into his writing, and for encouraging other writers to do the same. When this undeclared lobbying on behalf of Japan Tobacco International was revealed, Scruton was gruffly sacked from a bunch of magazines and newspapers, including the Financial Times – a long overdue cull, but for the wrong reasons.

If any account managers for British American or Philip Morris are reading The Dreadnought, please know: I am open for service. Line my coffers well enough and I’ll be just as loose with my morals as Scruton was. My references will be tasteful and delicate. I will be a loyal servant. Labour’s attempt at trying to ban smoking in the gardens of pubs, or anywhere, it seems, other than on a hilltop in the Cairngorms, has made me overnight a rapacious mercenary. If there is to be a war about this, I will be its partisan and soldier of fortune. Pick up the phone. Let’s start the bidding.

All the usual caveats apply: these tobacco types are all slimy goblins, profiting from death, etc, engineers of addiction, amongst the worst of the corporate bastards. But there is a degree of honesty in their trade – a ruthless extraction of cash from the dependent – which is more respectable still than being a common prig (at best) or a terrorist for temperance (at worst). “Over 80,000 people lose their lives every year because of smoking,” Keir Starmer has said. “A huge burden on the NHS.” Also a burden on the NHS is the criminally low pay of its nurse and junior doctors and the failure to properly fund a treasured institution. Instead of picking our pockets and telling us what we can get up to in our precious spots of free time, Starmer’s government could easily pinch from those of the grotesquely wealthy instead.

Not long ago, the last Labour government in New Zealand tried to ban smoking outright. It was the very final policy at the bottom of their very shallow barrel. Having spent years in power doing not much of anything but coasting on the vibes of its youngish prime minister, they tried to make one segment of the population feel more moral and superior than the other. The smoking ban wasn’t why they lost the election; they lost because a smoking ban was the final bit of proof they had no ideas left. It does not augur well if the British Labour Party is doing the same thing at the start of its term. Starmer promised “mission-driven government” in July, and now we know what the sixth of these missions is: misery, with a side-order of hectoring and puritanism. Next to be banned: bouncy castles, booze on trains, shagging.

The welter of a British August is made that little bit more tolerable by a longish afternoon (and dusk, if you’re lucky) in the company of good friends and a full pack. Too young by a year to be allowed to smoke indoors, I nevertheless grew up with the instinctive, surface-level solidarity of the outdoor smoking area; its natural huddles, its shared conversation-starter, the feeling that we were (and are) better, cooler, more joyful than the rubes indoors. Where else are you to go now if you want to get some proper flirting done?

In this Labour Party we find all the brutality and squalor of the neoliberal age and none of the permissiveness. With one hand we are punished – high inflation, falling wages, retreating welfare services – and the last bit of cash for a weekly pleasure gets nicked from our pockets. With the other hand, they take away those pleasures and tell us it’s for the good of the realm. Really it’s just another sham policy to lay on the pile of other sham policies which make up scrap-blanket covering the hole where all the money ought to be. When growth is dangling somewhere round the ankles of the nation, it’s probably best not to target the nation’s backbone: its pubs. Labour, it seems, would prefer them as austere, cookie-cutter, and boring as their front bench. The prime minister spent roughly 87.6% of last election reminding us “My dad was a toolmaker.” Now it’s clear: it was a warning. His father really did make a tool.