Labour’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill Necromancy is a Dark Omen

I didn’t vote for Labour or anyone else in the last election. I, like many others, found the choices on offer uninspiring. But when a new government comes in, I believe in giving that administration a chance to show us what they are about. My worry is that by exhuming the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, Labour has done precisely that.

A curious mandate

Labour winning 411 seats was remarkable. Not so much because it happened, but more how it happened. The emergence of Reform hammered the faltering Conservatives, who never quite recovered from the sleaze and corruption around COVID and everything else. Throw in the collapse of the SNP, and it was a perfect storm for Labour.

It always felt like Starmer’s campaign was pageantry. Rolling around, sprinkling a bit of “my father was a toolmaker” here and a bit of “when I was the Director of Public Prosecutions” there, never quite getting his vision for the country across. But all that is immaterial because he got over the line.

It’s hard to argue that Labour have a true mandate to lead the country. As many people noted in the days after the election, their 9.7 million ballots were just 32% of the voting share—far less than Jeremy Corbyn’s 12.8 million in 2017 and 10.2 million in 2019. However, with voter turnout an astonishingly low 60%, beating Corbyn’s figures would always be a tall order.

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill was a bad policy—and it still is. As the excellent Martin Cullip points out, isolating 5 million UK vapers was one of Rishi Sunak’s many bad decisions. As the Conservatives limped to 121 seats, I wonder if that cohort crossed the diminutive PM’s mind.

For the people?

As the Financial Times John Burn-Murdoch pointed out in this excellent graphic, “Labour won its lowest ever share of the vote in deprived areas (<50% for the first time), and its highest ever share in affluent areas.”

These figures support the very real fear that Labour is not a party for the people. Instead, their policies and rhetoric sing to a different demographic, one that Will Davies in the LRB deliciously describes as “dwelling comfortably in a world of EasyJet flights to Barcelona and obscure Ottolenghi recipe ingredients.”

And look, that’s fine. Parties evolve and change, and so too does who and what they represent. Yet, my big fear is that Labour actually believes they know what is best for working people.

I wrote about this in the lead up to the election, so i’ll include this here:

People in these deprived areas more or less rejected Labour in the last three elections. They don’t feel that the party is listening to or addressing their concerns on a number of issues, and I don’t think the Tobacco and Vapes Bill is going to change that feeling.

Let’s put aside the impracticality, ridiculousness, and complex logistics of banning the sale of cigarettes to people under a certain age and focus on the disposable vape ban and what it means for people in low-income communities and the goal of reducing smoking-related death and illness in the country.

Labour and the disposable ban

While Labour is yet to clarify its plans for banning disposable vapes, in January this year, Starmer said he’d supported the policy for two years, and criticised the Conservatives for being slow to act on the ban.

I’ve heard people say that banning disposables won’t be a major problem. They say that pod systems will provide refuge to disposable users. However, pod systems were available for years, but they never had the impact of disposables.

When it comes to helping people who smoke switch to safer sources of nicotine, no product has the convenience of disposables except for perhaps nicotine pouches.

The stark fact is that 1 in 4 adults in deprived areas smoke cigarettes. For Labour’s increasingly middle class voter base, smoking is essentially a thing of the past. In fact, at 6% prevalence, the least deprived areas are almost “smoke free”. These voters, like many other Labour MPs, don’t seem in tune with the problem. If they were, they wouldn’t be so cavalier about blocking access to smoking alternative products.

By reviving the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, Labour has set a train in motion. The unintended consequences of their actions will likely include the following:

• A rise in black market cigarette consumption, which already accounts for 11% of cigarette sales in the country.
• An increase in UK smoking rates as people return to cigarettes.
• A widening of already scandalous socioeconomic health disparities.

A Labour government worth its salt would not throw working people on the fire to slake the desires of neurotic middle-class parents. I hope Wes Streeting takes a more dynamic approach to reducing smoking rates in deprived areas. His thinking must go beyond prohibition and instead focus on a few things, like:

• Ensuring people in deprived areas have access to accurate information about harm reduction products like vapes and pouches.
• Acknowledge that banning disposables will increase harm.
• Listen to consumers about what helped them quit.
• Seek the advice of the excellent academics and consumer advocates working in the space.

Until we see a more pragmatic approach, being smoke free will remain an aspiration in some of the most neglected communities.