Alan Johnson: Smoking should be banned

Whilst defending the government’s push to ban the public display of cigarettes in shops, Mr Johnson went slightly further in revealing his preferred course of action on Five Live this morning:

Shelagh Fogarty: Wouldn’t it be easier just to ban smoking altogether?
Johnson: And I think the Department of Health wants to do that, but it wouldn’t be enforceable.

Good to see the Health Secretary holds personal choice so highly.  By ‘enforceable’, Johnson presumably actually means that it would be hard to find a group other than smokers from which it would be as popular to take £8.2bn a year in tax, or a group that would accept it as readily.  There’s no economic argument behind it (broken window fallacy?), but the consensus against smokers’ rights simply makes it politically convenient.

This is a typical “If I don’t smoke, nobody else should either” attitude that typifies bureaucratic ‘thinking’ (is that the right word?).  At least then-Health Secretary John Reid got almost-the-right-idea when he opposed the smoking ban because it’s one of the ‘few pleasures left to the working class‘.  Perhaps Johnson should remember that when he next spouts off about how he’s so downtrodden because he used to deliver mail to Dorneywood and stack shelves in Tesco.

If it’s just a matter of trying to ban what they don’t do themselves, the logical extreme holds some worrying implications.  For ten years, Johnson was a full-time trade unionist - maybe we should ban working?  He left school at 15 - so maybe we should ban higher eduation?  I don’t think anyone could say that’s in our interest, and I don’t think anyone could say that about banning smoking, either.