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Are you suffering from memory loss? The Conservative party certainly seems to be.
Responding to the news that Keir Starmer’s Government is considering imposing a new ban on smoking in beer gardens, and other public spaces, a series of senior Conservative figures came out today to condemn it as a deeply disturbing and “authoritarian” proposal.
“Today’s news is more evidence that Labour hates freedom”, the party’s Twitter feed declared darkly.
“This isn’t about people’s health. It’s about social control.”
Of course this will be news to anyone who is able to remember as far back into the mists of time as just last month.
Back then their current leader, Rishi Sunak, led his party into the general election on a manifesto, which not just promised to ban smoking in beer gardens, but everywhere else too.
Under these supposedly ‘freedom-hating’ plans, anyone born after 2009 would have never been allowed to purchase, or smoke, cigarettes ever again.
At the time of its announcement, this supposedly disturbing act of “social control” was lauded by the Sunak as a world-leading initiative.
“This will save more lives than any other decision we could take,” he told his party conference last autumn.
“As Prime Minister I have an obligation to do what I think is the right thing for our country in the long-term”.
Yet now that his successors have endorsed his same plan, while proposing to extend it to include a more immediate ban on smoking in beer gardens, we are all being asked to believe that this is somehow the beginning of outright totalitarianism.
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Short-Term Memory Loss
Of course there are reasonable grounds for debate on the policy itself. Smoking has been in steady decline for decades, with just 13% of all UK adults still buying cigarettes.
It is therefore reasonable to argue that ramping up current plans is unnecessary at a time when it’s gradually dying out anyway.
It is also reasonable to question its impact on the hospitality industry, despite one of its leading figures suggesting today that it will make little to no difference.
It is also reasonable to take a straightforwardly libertarian position that all such bans are wrong, regardless of their impact.
However, what it is not reasonable to do is to claim one month that imposing the most restrictive smoking ban anywhere in the world is somehow a brilliant policy, only to then claim the very next month that a slight tweaking of that same plan is the beginning of an authoritarian nightmare.
Yet just as the Conservative party is now trying to convince us to worry about cronyism and tax rises, after themselves raising them to their highest level in decades, so too are we now being asked to not so much rewrite recent history, as to forget it altogether.