Two stories struck me yesterday, since they share a theme: In the first instance, Michael O’Leary wants airports to restrict the sale of alcohol to passengers before they get on the plane. In the second instance, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer wants to restrict or even ban smoking in areas where it is currently legal, including in outdoor beer gardens in pubs.
The two stories obviously share a theme: in both cases, the argument is being made that personal freedoms that people currently enjoy should be circumscribed in the common good, and in the name of public health and safety.
Starmer’s argument, in particular, was explicit:
🚨 WATCH: Keir Starmer confirms he's considering banning smoking in some outside areas
— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) August 29, 2024
"My starting point on this is to remind everyone that over 80,000 people lose their lives every year because of smoking. That's a preventable death... so yes, we are going to take decisions" https://t.co/K9BIRcVe2r pic.twitter.com/HYPWKHp6eO
“It’s a huge burden on the NHS”, says Starmer, which of course appeals to the petty tyrant in all of us: Why should I pay for your lifestyle?
Yet of course, as Paddy O’Gorman pointed out in an excoriating article in these pages a few short days ago, the state has no difficulty at all in paying for certain lifestyles. It expends vast sums of money every year in Ireland on paying for PrEP treatments for gay men which, as Paddy compellingly argues, amount to the state subsidising people’s preference for unprotected sex.
At around about the same time as Starmer was making the remarks above, the polling firm YouGov released polling showing that by a margin of 3 to 1, voters agree with Michael O’Leary that airport users should be restricted to purchasing no more than two alcoholic drinks in an airport, ostensibly in order to prevent anti-social behaviour from occurring when some people drink too much and behave badly.
Yet the logic of that, if you follow it through, is compelling: Why restrict the restrictions on drinking more than two beverages simply to airports? Could one not make exactly the same argument about pubs and nightclubs, on the very reasonable grounds that people drinking too much leads to people behaving anti-socially, whether that be through brawling in the streets or urinating in public or singing “two world wars and one world cup” at unsuspecting German tourists in London?
Combine the two proposals, and you would get pubs where people go, have two drinks, are forbidden from smoking, and end up going home completely sober so as they can be on time for work the next morning. It’s the sensible person’s tyranny: the idea that everybody should conform to their lifestyle, and their preferences, at the cost of removing a lot of the fun in life.
It’s particularly funny, I think, because this new puritanism coincides with a self-image of western society that is entirely against puritanism and fancies itself as libertine: Have as many sexual partners as you want; Legalise recreational drugs; Cycle naked through Cork City and meet with the Mayor; Pin pride stickers on every lamp-post. But, for god’s sake, don’t have a fag and three pints.
One of the reasons for this contradiction, I think, is aspirational: The people who approve of banning drinking and smoking but favour absolute liberty in areas like sex and drugs tend to be people who’ve already experienced drinking and smoking, either personally or in the lives of family members – but most of them haven’t had the 20-sexual-partners-in-a-week experience, or the “doing cocaine at a rave” experience. But they like to imagine themselves as those kind of people. At the same time, there’s a certain cultural snobbery at play towards chaps from Newcastle with St. Georges Flag tattoos on their bellies who like to get drunk on beer and sing rude songs about the Germans. Ed West wrote something insightful about this recently in reference to holidays: That middle class tendency to imagine that one’s own holiday is much more cultured and sophisticated than the one being enjoyed by the beer-swilling oafs singing songs in the local Piazza.
The other reason is not cultural at all, but political: We’ve shrunken politics, in the west, down to the minutiae.
I was struck this week that the UK Labour Government is obsessing about a £22billion “black hole” in the UK’s public finances. It sounds bad, to be sure, until you remember that the UK’s annual budget was £1.15 trillion last year, and that £22 billion is less than 2% of the UK’s annual spending. That’s not a “black hole” – it’s a small budgetary deficit, over which the Government and opposition are obsessing. In large part because the state is so big and so all-encompassing that the Labour Government doesn’t seem to feel it could muster even a small saving annually from the massive NHS budget.
As I’ve written here before, the inability of politicians to wrangle the massive state that they have created, and solve any of the major structural problems across society, leaves you with a politics like this: Where problems are invented and prejudices appealed to. Politicians cannot fix your household heating bill, but what they can do for you is make somebody else more miserable than they already are by ruining their Friday night out in the pub. If you’re a struggling family with multiple children and bills to pay, that’s not going to help you, but it might just make you feel like you are missing out on less.
And so this is the state of affairs we live with: People want to legalise the things that they imagine they might one day be the kinds of people who might do those things, and they want to ban the things they don’t like other people doing. In the meantime, the big problems go unaddressed.
I’ll leave you with an example of what I’m talking about, from the UK Tory leadership election. One of the candidates, Tom Tugendhat, wants to give graduates a tax break for a number of years “to help them save for a house”. That’s interesting, and all – but I’d like to hear Tom Tugendhat and other conservatives ask and answer bigger questions, like “why do graduates need a special tax break just to be able to save for a house?” or “why have homes become so unaffordable that people can’t buy them without Government subsidies?”
Those are big problems. Smoking in pub gardens, and drinking in airports, are not big problems. They’re just the only ones politicians have any ideas how to talk about.