𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

The Government is playing grandmother’s footsteps with us as it seeks to stamp out smoking. It proposes gradually making the sale of tobacco illegal through a so-called generational smoking ban. Under legislation now before Parliament, shopkeepers will not be able to sell it to anyone born after 2008.

Right now only 17-year-olds will be affected (and they are already too young to smoke), but 10 years from now under this new law, a 28-year-old will be able to buy cigarettes, but a 27-year-old will be banned. And so forth as the decades roll on. A smoke-free future looms on the distant horizon when you will need to be a pensioner to comply with the law.

The idea, first dreamed up by Rishi Sunak in the dying days of the last Conservative government, but picked up by Keir Starmer, is plainly nonsensical. Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers; Starmer appears to want them to double as the health police.

The proposal is unworkable because it can so easily be circumvented. The 28-year-old can pop into the convenience store and buy two packets of cigarettes, giving one to his 27-year-old friend waiting outside. No crime has been committed. And what shop assistant wants to wind up checking the ages of grown men and women?

Intention good, execution awful. We all know that smoking is one of the main causes of preventable death in Britain. It is bad for your health and bad for the health of those around you. Tens of thousands die each year from smoking-related causes.

There can be no argument with the ambitions of government and public health bodies to minimise those deaths. Recent measures such as plain packaging or display bans have had an impact on the declining death toll.

These efforts have already translated into smoking rates being at record low levels. Fewer than one in ten adults now smoke. This is about half of what it was when the Coalition government started tracking smoking rates in 2011 – at least half the levels of most of our European counterparts.

By normal standards, this should represent an overwhelming success for a public health campaign.

But the generational smoking ban is a dead duck. The only country to have tried it, New Zealand, dropped it within a few short months.

All these heavy-handed measures do is empower criminals at home and abroad. The United States’s prohibition of alcohol famously created modern organised crime. Australia’s punitive taxes on tobacco (£30 a pack or so) have led to regular firebombings as rival gangs compete for territory and sales of black-market cigarettes.

Such prohibition is also, quite frankly, unnecessary. Not just because the current methods are clearly working but also because there are more effective changes one could make, that would be much less open to ridicule.

A simpler and more effective answer would be to raise the minimum smoking age to 21 from its current level of 18. There is overwhelming evidence that, in Britain, most of those who smoke started in their teenage years.

So, if we truly want to deter smoking, why not change the rules here? By raising the age to 21, we remove all legal access to tobacco when most smokers develop the habit.

Of course, this wouldn’t end all smoking, but it is silly to suggest that the generational ban would be any different. No ban is ever completely effective; there will always be those prepared to break the law.

I haven’t even touched on the serious problem of the ban’s incompatibility with the Windsor Framework, which means that EU single market laws still apply in Northern Ireland, and these laws rule out measures such as the generational smoking ban. Several EU member states have already objected to the European Commission, triggering the threat of court action against the UK

In any case, perhaps we are aiming at the wrong target. As a teacher friend of mine said the other day, we don’t often catch kids smoking behind the bike sheds. But we do catch them vaping. Vaping is cool among teenagers in a way smoking is not. To break the nicotine addiction cycle, we should focus our attention on the main contemporary threat – vapes.

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill goes some way to deter vaping, restricting the display, bright colours and flavours of vapes – all intended to appeal to young eyes.

Why not go further and raise the vaping age to 21, the same as for tobacco?

We still don’t know the full health impact of vaping, but there are already worrying signs. Of course, it may be healthier than conventional smoking but that does not mean it is harmless. And while many smokers have used vaping as an exit from tobacco, it still can be a gateway to cigarettes.

Just as with smoking, if you do not vape before the age of 21, it is reasonable to suppose that you will never take it up or go on to buy cigarettes.

Keir Starmer is adept at performing U-turns (14 so far by general account). Dropping the generational smoking ban and making 21 the legal age for smoking and vaping would be one of his more sensible ones.

• David Jones served as a Conservative Welsh Secretary and Brexit minister and now supports Reform UK.