Le Grande Idea?

February 16th, 2008 |

Back in October I read a piece in the Indie about a “radical prescription for our health crisis” and one of them, put forward by Professor Julian Le Grand, chair of Health England and a former senior Downing Street aide to Tony Blair, was to licence tobacco smokers.

Yes. You read it correctly. If you want to buy tobacco you would need a photo-licence - renewable on an annual basis.

‘More nanny state tosh!’ I thought at the time. Not so it would appear from BBC Radio 5 Live as he’s still bleating on about it four months later and a department of health spokeswoman did not rule out such a scheme as part of the next wave of tobacco regulation. She said: ‘We will be consulting later this year on the next steps on tobacco control.’

The words that frighten me are “tobacco control” - are we not talking here about citizen control? I always thought that we all had a (relative) freedom of choice in this country and as they propose to hand all the licence money to the NHS it is not just another stealth tax as the revenue raised by smokers already goes in that direction? The proposed fee for the licence would raise £230 million if, as proposed, it is structured at £10 per and every smoker acquires one.

I’ve changed my mind about the ‘nanny’ state. It is now a bully state and I do hope that if HMG tries to bring this into being that someone will stand up for smokers because you know what..? The next thing down the line will be needing a licence to buy alcohol and then one to buy food that isn’t deemed healthy and to get pregnant and…

Will the last person to leave this country please turn out the lights for as we all “know” they create global warming and anyway you need a licence to buy an incandescent bulb.

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