The nanny state is sanitising Britain to death

The UK’s landmark Tobacco and Vapes Act, which became law in April this year (and has since been buried by a typically, and very modern, frenetic news cycle), was hailed as a triumph for public health. By permanently phasing out the legal sale of cigarettes to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009, it promises to create the world’s first ‘smoke-free generation’.

It’s difficult (though not impossible) to object to this from a medical perspective. Smoking remains one of the leading preventable causes of death in Britain. Fewer smokers will mean fewer cancer patients, fewer heart attacks, fewer loved ones losing family members prematurely and, in theory, less of a burden on the NHS. Put like that, it all seems pretty admirable.

But it’s important to look beyond the medical perspective to what this legislation represents. It is, perhaps, the clearest expression yet of the creeping sanitisation of Britain that has been underway over the past two to three decades.

Sanitisation is an entirely sensible principle in the right context. We sanitise hospitals to prevent infection. We sanitise kitchens to stop disease. But increasingly, the instinct to sanitise has escaped those settings and begun to shape everyday life itself. More and more, our politics is driven by the assumption that unhealthy pleasures should not merely be discouraged, but gradually engineered out of existence altogether.

I’m not trying to defend cigarettes – but they don’t really deserve it, do they? The ban is significant because it asks a different question from previous tobacco legislation. Successive governments raised duties, banned advertising and introduced plain packaging in order to reduce smoking. The new law goes a step further, though. It envisages a future in which smoking simply ceases to exist as a legal choice for successive generations of adults.

This is incredible. Whether you support the outcome or not, it reflects a new understanding of the relationship between citizen and state. Government is no longer content to inform us of the risks involved with smoking, or even to nudge us towards better choices through ruinous taxation on proscribed goods. It is now outright deciding more and more how we should be allowed to lead our lives.

Tobacco proscription is far from an isolated case. Scotland introduced minimum-unit pricing for alcohol. Sugar is taxed in soft drinks. Junk-food advertising faces ever-tighter restrictions. And supermarkets are told where sweets may be displayed.

Each measure taken by itself may seem pretty sensible – alcoholism, for instance, has historically been high in Scotland. But taken together, they reveal a broader philosophy. Health is no longer simply one consideration among many. It has become the guiding principle for policymakers, the main lens through which they view ordinary life.

Look at the steady ratcheting-up of alcohol taxation and pricing. Defenders will understandably point to the health benefits of pricing people out of excessive drinking. However, there have been massive social costs that are rarely spoken about.

Meeting friends at the pub has become prohibitively expensive for many people, accelerating the decline of an institution that has long been one of Britain’s great social levellers. As pubs close, high streets lose yet another reason for people to gather, while more socialising retreats into the private home – or disappears altogether. At a time when loneliness, anxiety and depression are widely recognised as defining features of modern life, it seems oddly self-defeating to make one of our oldest and most accessible forms of community ever more difficult to afford.

This carries consequences beyond public health. A civilisation cannot be measured solely by reductions in smoking prevalence, obesity or alcohol consumption. Human beings should not be treated as optimisation projects. We are soulful creatures, dancing animals, as Kurt Vonnegut put it. So let us dance! Or, at least, don’t dare to stand in the way as we do so. We need the unexpected, the excessive and the gloriously imperfect. Because some of the things that make life so rich and enjoyable (and at times simply bearable) are, by definition, a little indulgent. A long evening in the pub with friends is unlikely to impress a public-health policymaker. Yet these things endure because they bring people together, create memories – they feed our souls.

Public-health analysis is exceptionally good at measuring costs to the NHS or years of life gained. It is much less capable of measuring the value of conviviality, ritual, celebration or simple pleasure. What metric would you use to measure the value of lingering over another pint with friends; or standing outside smoking with a couple of co-workers, released for a moment from the day’s mundanity; or of sitting in your garden with a nice Scotch and a cheeky smoke at the end of the day. There is no real calculation for what is lost when life becomes incrementally cleaner, safer and more carefully managed.

The danger is not that Britain suddenly becomes joyless. This kind of sanitisation can be a subtler thing. Many interventions might appear modest and reasonable (though I wouldn’t describe the Tobacco and Vapes Act as either), and many restrictions are introduced in pursuit of a worthy objective. But they accumulate over time. Life’s rough edges are smoothed away.

And where does this health-policymaking logic ultimately lead? If the government sees its principal role as maximising healthy life expectancy, there will always be another habit to discourage, another risk factor to regulate and another pleasure whose costs can be quantified. Leaving your house can be risky, you know (if memory serves, there was a time in the not-so-distant past when we were indeed banned from doing that).

None of this is an argument against reducing smoking or informing people about genuine risks. But there is a profound difference between helping adults make informed decisions and gradually deciding which decisions adults ought no longer to be permitted to make at all.

The smoke-free generation may well prove healthier than those who came before it. Lung cancer and heart disease will probably fall; younger generations will probably, on average, be more athletically capable than us oldies. But the legislation also marks another step in a broader cultural journey, one in which Britain increasingly seeks to sanitise everyday life. The question is not whether we will become physically healthier – or, at least, less ill. We almost certainly will. It is whether, in our pursuit of longer lives, we are slowly forgetting what makes life rich enough to be worth prolonging in the first place.

James Dixon is a Glasgow-based novelist, poet and playwright.