There’s something almost poetic in being born just early enough to watch freedom die. I belong to the first generation in British history that will be legally prohibited from ever buying tobacco. Not discouraged, not dissuaded—prohibited. I am to be forbidden by law from buying a product that has been used for centuries, that will remain legal for anyone born before 2009. I have no intention of taking up smoking. I’m not interested in yellow fingers, hacking coughs, or death by mucus. But I’m even less interested in a world where the State makes that decision for me.
I have just read this report in The Evening Standard. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill is being sold as the act that will usher in a “smoke-free generation.” The details are as creepy as the name. No one born on or after 1 January 2009 will ever be allowed to buy cigarettes. The law won’t just raise the legal age—it will raise it year by year, until one half of the population is trusted with bodily autonomy and the other half is not. Vapes will be regulated too. Flavours will be restricted. Packaging will be redesigned. Displays will be hidden. Advertising will be banned.
And how is all this to be enforced? You already know the answer. Identity checks. Age verification. Surveillance. You will need to show your papers to buy a packet of cigarettes. That is: we are back to the argument for state-issued identity cards, floated every few years by people for whom every actual or fabricated problem is to be packaged as an excuse for tagging the population.
According to Bob Blackman, a so-called Conservative MP:
This report sets out a comprehensive plan that accelerate our progress to a smoke free UK. Further delay comes at too great a cost.
Mr Blackman is a Fake Conservative, one of those plastic freedom-lovers who talk about responsibility and liberty to their constituents every five years, then scuttle back to London to vote for whatever new bossy rule some NGO lobbyist is pushing. A man who thinks the great challenge of the 21st century is that we’re not banning things fast enough.
It would be funny if it weren’t so bleak.
According to the Department of Health and Social Control (I paraphrase only slightly), the Bill is a triumph:
The government is delivering the world leading Tobacco and Vapes Bill, creating the first smoke-free generation and ending the cycle of addiction and disadvantage.
To clamp down on youth vaping, the Bill will ban vape advertising and sponsorship, and provide powers to regulate flavours and packaging, and how and where they are displayed in shops.
We’re supporting current smokers to quit by investing an additional £70 million for local Stop Smoking Services…
Let’s pick that apart. First, “world leading” is not a compliment. It is code for: we’re more deranged than anyone else. It means our government is sprinting down a path so stupid that even the Australians haven’t followed us yet.
“Supporting current smokers to quit”? In the same way that a burglar supports your minimalist lifestyle. He’s not helping you—he’s stealing from you, then congratulating himself for doing you a favour.
And what about “investing £70 million”? It’s not investment. It’s subsidy—for the special interests and bureaucrats who thrive on turning personal vice into job creation schemes for the public health industry. It’s more money, taken from taxpayers, spent on programmes that exist to infantilise them.
This whole thing is rotten. And, like all prohibition schemes, it will fail in exactly the same way all the others have. Smoking won’t disappear. It will go underground. Supply will shift from regulated shops to criminal gangs. Counterfeit cigarettes, laced with God-knows-what, will be smuggled in, sold in corners and alleyways. Prices will go up. Quality will go down. Violence will increase. The police will act confused.
And that, I suspect, is part of the plan.
Every expansion of prohibition is a direct subsidy to organised crime. And that is useful. Not to us, of course. But to the ruling class. Because laundering the profits of illegal markets is now a staple of high finance. And enforcing the laws, or pretending to, is the excuse for ever more surveillance, checkpoints, powers of search. In short, prohibition is profitable—not for us, but for the kind of people who wear lanyards and use “stakeholder” as a noun.
You could try writing to your MP about this. You will get, if anything, a form letter about “reducing harm for all our kids.” They’re always talking about the kids. Never mind that the real goal is a lifetime control grid, where every purchase is monitored, every deviation punished, every pleasure policed. The moral is that the State does not want you to be an adult. It wants you to be a patient. A minor. A ward.
I will not comply.
I am not a smoker. I am not a vaper. But I am a human being. And my body belongs to me—not to Parliament, not to the NHS, not to whatever World Health Organisation parasite is writing the next Five Year Plan for Human Improvement.
This nightmare managerial state will not last. It cannot last. It produces nothing but regulations and dependency. When it falls, we will not rebuild it. We will not forgive it. We will not forget who upheld it.
Make a list.
Remember the names.
Wait for the reckoning.
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I agree
Not government’s job or right
As a lifelong nonsmoker I couldn’t agree more!
I am appalled—truly appalled—by the article entitled *“The Tobacco Ban: Another Step towards the Total State”*, published by The Libertarian Alliance and written, no less, by a sixteen-year-old. That such reactionary bile should spill from one so young is not merely distressing—it is indicative of a broader and dangerous failure in our educational system. For this alone, his school should receive an urgent visit from Ofsted, with a view to re-educating both staff and pupils in the values of collective responsibility and trust in democratic authority.
The article rails against what the author sees as a creeping “total state.” In reality, what the government has proposed—a phased ban on the sale of tobacco products to successive age groups—is a model of public-spirited legislation. It is a morally serious, evidence-led measure to protect future generations from addiction, illness, and early death. But instead of applauding this brave intervention, the author equates it with tyranny. Why? Because it limits his “freedom” to poison himself. I hardly know whether to laugh or cry.
This obsession with “freedom,” I must say, is now a tell-tale sign of far-right radicalisation. One sees the word appear—capitalised, brandished, fetishised—and one knows immediately what is coming: a childish tantrum against authority, dressed up in pseudo-intellectual terms. These people invoke “freedom” and “rights” as if they were neutral or timeless categories. They are not. They are ideological constructs, historically deployed to justify resistance to progressive reform, to public health campaigns, and to any form of government that attempts to guide behaviour in socially responsible directions.
No serious, modern, democratic society can allow “freedom” to be weaponised in this way. We are not in the eighteenth century. We live in a complex, interdependent society in which the state has a duty to promote not individual whim, but collective welfare. To restrict access to harmful products is not tyranny—it is governance. To reduce the range of choices that actively damage society is not oppression—it is liberation from corporate exploitation and personal weakness.
And what, precisely, does this young writer want? A society in which thirteen-year-olds can vape bubblegum-flavoured nicotine pods under the approving eye of the local corner shop? A society in which the NHS is bankrupted by the entirely preventable effects of smoking, just so this boy can play out his adolescent fantasy of resistance? It is madness.
That this individual is only sixteen is no excuse. In fact, it is cause for deeper concern. He has absorbed, already, the worst instincts of the libertarian right: contempt for government, suspicion of authority, and an almost religious reverence for “personal responsibility”—by which he really means irresponsibility. The fact that such ideology now finds a voice in schoolchildren is a national disgrace.
The Department for Education must act. The school in question must be investigated. Its curriculum must be reviewed. Its safeguarding procedures must be examined. And let us be clear: no child should be permitted to publish such dangerous nonsense under the guise of legitimate commentary. The role of education is not to foster this sort of delusional self-expression—it is to create good citizens, loyal to the state, and committed to the common good.
In short, this article is a wake-up call. Freedom is not a blank cheque. And those who champion it so wildly are not heroes—they are, more often than not, foot soldiers of the far right, cloaked in the tatters of Enlightenment rhetoric. That we now see their slogans echoed in teenage essays is proof, if any were needed, that the rot has gone deep. And it must be cut out. Immediately.