The sudden announcement of a July general election means that Rishi Sunak’s smoking ban bill—which he hoped would be a, or perhaps his only, ‘legacy’ policy—will be shelved.
It’s not that the prime minister has had a change of heart; just yesterday, on May 23rd, he was celebrating that the law, dubbed the “toughest” of its kind in the world, means the next generation will “grow up smoke-free.”
Rather, the shutting down of Parliament ahead of the national vote means there will not be time to push the law through.
TalkTV presenter Kevin O’Sullivan suggests, however, that Sunak “has been planning to abandon his nanny state smoking ban for months.”
It is, after all, a good bit of political play. The PM knows that Labour—as liberties campaigner Simon Clark has put it—“will no doubt resuscitate the generational ban” after it wins the election, which it is expected to do. That means that in five years, Tory MPs will be able to appeal to the electorate by bashing Labour for putting the restrictive scheme, which bans the sale of tobacco to those born after January 1st, 2009, into law.
Indeed, voters tend to have short (political) memories, and are unlikely to remember that it was the Conservatives who actually introduced the bill in the first place. Who now remembers, for example, that former Tory PM and then-Mayor Boris Johnson introduced London’s Ultra Low Emission (ULEZ) Zone—the first in the world—which the Conservatives now bash Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan for.
Clark added in response to the shelving of the smoking bill that “it would be nice to think that what’s left of the Tory party in the Commons [after the election] will, under a new leader, oppose the policy.”
“Either way,” he said, “the fight goes on.”
As The European Conservative previously pointed out, “even if the legislation is not completed before the Conservatives lose the next general election, it will likely then be put into action fairly swiftly by the next (pro-tobacco ban) Labour government.”
