Smoking ban: Liz Truss targets ‘unelected’ health department officials
Liz Truss has blamed “unelected individuals” at the Department of Health and Social Care for the government’s planned smoking ban, as she launched an apparent attack on civil servants such as England’s chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty.
The former prime minister also claimed that Thérèse Coffey, her friend and health minister in Truss’s short-lived government, had put the plans “in the bin” but that they had “resurfaced like a bad penny”.
Truss launched her attack in an interview with the BBC as hostilities between Conservative MPs began ahead of the second reading of the Tobacco and Vaping Bill on Tuesday, with another former minister rejecting her claim that the plans were “unconservative”.
“What I think about this smoking ban is that it is something that the Department of Health (i.e. unelected individuals) has been pushing for for some time,” Truss told the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason in one of the last in a series. of interviews to promote her new book.
Truss, who has limited support among Tory MPs after her disastrous stint in Downing Street but is one of the leaders of the rebellion against the bill, claimed she was concerned about where the proposals would lead, and suggested people should can end up with a ‘sugar benefit’. ”.
Her intervention came as legislation, which would ban anyone born after 2009 from buying cigarettes, is due to be debated in parliament for the first time on Tuesday.
Truss did not mention Whitty by name, who used a Guardian article on Tuesday to say lobbying by big tobacco “must be tackled head-on” as email evidence emerged that campaign tactics were used to pressure MPs to clamp down on Rishi Sunak’s smoking. ban bill.
Another former minister, Jesse Norman, meanwhile, took aim at colleagues in his own party on Tuesday, saying on the social media platform
“It is a gradual, long-term reform that will not affect anyone who smokes now, protects young people from a dangerously addictive drug, supports the NHS and saves the taxpayer and society a fortune.”
Sir Simon Clarke, a former minister and one of the Tory MPs who opposed the bill, claimed the government’s generational smoking ban risked making the habit ‘cooler’ and was a ‘slippery slope’ was towards a ban on alcohol and fast food.
“There are good ways to tackle a problem like this, but there are also bad ways, and I think a complete ban risks being counterproductive. I think this risks making smoking cooler, it certainly risks creating a black market, and it also risks creating an unmanageable challenge for the authorities,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today.
Clarke said education and the tax system should be used as tools to deter people from smoking.
Asked about opinion polls showing that two-thirds of people in Britain supported a phased smoking ban – a figure that rose to 70% among those who voted Conservative in 2019, Clarke said: “There are of course some things that are not necessarily philosophical or practical is correct, which would gain support in the opinion polls.”