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The British House of Commons on Tuesday evening voted in favor of a bill proposed by Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak which would make it illegal for anyone born after 1 January 2009 to purchase cigarettes and other tobacco products in the UK. The text was approved with 383 votes in favor and 67 against. Although the parliamentary discussion is still at the beginning, the outcome of the vote has been much commented on since those who opposed it were mainly conservative MPs, i.e. members of Sunak’s own party, who consider the law profoundly contrary to the liberal values of their party.
Various countries have passed new anti-smoking restrictions in recent years, but if the law comes into force the UK would be the first country in the world to impose such a ban. However, the legislative path is still long: now members of the House of Commons will be able to propose amendments to the text, which will then have to be approved again by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, where the final vote is expected in mid-June.
In its current form the bill proposes that every year the legal age for purchasing cigarettes, now 18, increases by one year: concretely this means that in 2050 a forty-year-old will not be able to legally buy a pack of cigarettes in the country, while people born before 2009 will be able to continue to do so. The proposal is inspired by a law that was due to come into force in New Zealand in July 2023, but was repealed by the new coalition government in February.
By law, however, smoking it will not be a crime: only the act of selling cigarettes and other tobacco-containing products to anyone born in 2009 or later will be illegal and punishable with a fine. The government has said that people who can legally buy cigarettes today will not be banned in the future. The bill currently also includes measures to make e-cigarettes and other types of vaporizers less attractive to young people, for example by limiting the number of possible flavors and imposing new rules on the packaging in which they are sold.
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Although the design has yet to go through the most complicated phase of legislative process, i.e. the one in which the amendments are proposed, this first vote was extremely important: in recent months the approval of the text has become one of the main objectives of Sunak, whose popularity as prime minister is declining, as is that of his party . However, the main criticisms of this law come precisely from the Conservatives.
Of the 67 MPs who voted against on Tuesday, 57 were Conservatives. Additionally, a further 106 Conservative MPs abstained or were absent, meaning only 51 per cent of Conservative MPs supported the law. Given the open differences within the party, Sunak had not given any voting instructions to his MPs. The deputies who voted against said they did so because the proposal is contrary to the principles of the Conservative Party, which has always maintained that the state should intervene as little as possible in the lives of its citizens.
Several party officials, including former prime minister Liz Truss, they said that Sunak’s law “restricts people’s freedoms” and that for this reason it should not be a law proposed by a Conservative government. They also argued that it could become a dangerous precedent for other types of bans in the future, such as one on alcohol. Health Minister Victoria Atkins he said instead that “there is no freedom in addiction” and that many continue to smoke only because they start at a very young age, when they do not realize the consequences that smoking causes.
Other conservative MPs have instead contested the fact that the law would lead to adult citizens being treated differently: the Business Minister, Kemi Badenoch, the only member of the government to have voted against the law, he said that he did it precisely for this reason and because “I don’t believe that the end justifies the means”. Others argued that the law would encourage illegal tobacco trade and that it would be very difficult to enforce.
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The law passed thanks to the favorable votes cast by Labor Party MPs, who had been instructed to vote in favor and who accused the Conservatives of having voted against only to benefit the tobacco industry. Labor MP Wes Streeting commented on the outcome of the vote by saying that «Sunak may be too weak to convince his MPs to vote in favor of this important law, but on these benches we will put the country first».
Despite internal differences, Rishi Sunak also said that «as prime minister I have an obligation to do what I believe is the right thing for our country in the long term» and to aspire to «create a “smoke-free generation”».
According to British government calculations, smoking is the cause of death of around 80 thousand people a year in England alone. Sunak said explicitly that the decision was also made on the idea that reducing smoking would not only reduce deaths, but would also ease the costs incurred by the NHS in treating people who develop smoking-related health problems, such as stroke, heart disease. According to Sunak, the consequences of smoking cost the British healthcare system 17 billion pounds a year (around 20 billion euros). While these are estimates, these losses would be greater than 10 billion of pounds raised from taxes on tobacco and related products.
If the law maintains the support of the Labor Party and part of the Conservative Party, it has a good chance of being approved, but before the last vote it must still be discussed several times, all moments that conservative MPs will be able to exploit to propose amendments to modify it in a way substantial.
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