Smoking: no taxation without representation

Tuesday April 22, 2008

Smokers, says Robin Butler, are not fairly represented by government, so why should they pay £10 billion a year in tax?

From its coinage in mid-17th century colonial America, the rallying cry “No Taxation Without Representation” continues to resonate in the modern world. Perhaps it’s an appropriate slogan to be adopted by up to 12 million British citizens who insist on their right to enjoy smoking that other great American import, tobacco.

While there can be no denying that we smokers pay punishing and ever escalating taxes (currently around £4 on a packet of fags), can we claim that we are not represented? Worse than that, we are routinely misrepresented, from the gloomy, overspun utterances of a self-appointed health elite striving for political influence, to those late night TV black propaganda films using lurid images designed to link smokers in the public mind with purveyors of disease and death – unsexy, degenerate, and not the kind of people anyone would want for friends!

What a scurrilous, dishonest campaign, conceived to drive a wedge between smokers (the bad guys), and decent, wholesome, clean-living non-smokers (the good guys). It all serves to create a mythology in which smokers are no longer perceived primarily as fully paid-up members of the human race, but only as the sum of everything our detractors define as negative and destructive, and therefore not entitled to the same consideration as ‘proper’ people.

Affront

This puts me in mind of the way in which homosexuals were ‘dealt with’ in the early to mid-20th century. Homosexuals were seen as an affront to the masculinity of ordinary, decent blokes; they let the side down. Consequently, it was perceived as the duty of ordinary, decent blokes (usually in gangs) to beat the shit out of queers. Unpleasant, but, you know, it had to be done, and as the victims had no recourse to justice it was done with the tacit approval of the state.

That same bullying gang mentality is clearly evident in many of the individuals and groups who target smokers. There is something of the totalitarian in the mentality of these people: everyone has to be the same as them. But, instead of recognising its inherent dangers, our Government has harnessed this wave of mindless intolerance to launch its own attack, issuing a mass social exclusion order against millions of innocent British citizens.

To police this act, they have created a new army of town hall snoops whose job it is to sneak around spying on people before scuttling back to their offices to write up their reports and set in motion the machinery that would give hitherto exemplary citizens a police record. New Labour? New Taliban.

Representations

Before this ban came into force, there were many representations by and on behalf of smokers. People from the leisure industries, pubs, restaurants, bingo halls, insisted that they could provide safe smoking areas in their venues which would meet the demands of all their customers. Indeed, many of them already had effective facilities installed.

All the arguments for the protection of individual liberties of smokers, balanced by effective means of protecting the health and comfort of staff together with an acknowledgement of the non-smoker’s right not to be exposed to tobacco fumes, were swept aside by a government that was determined not to listen. When an elected government decides that it only wants to represent some of the electorate and not the rest, something has gone seriously wrong with democracy as most people understand it.

Which brings us back to the issue of no taxation without representation. Does this government have a moral right to collect a tobacco tax from people it is trying to airbrush out of society? The money at issue is no small sum. Including VAT, it amounts to almost ten billion pounds a year.

Happy

Personally, I’d be very happy for the Chancellor to have this money, every last penny of it. But hardly on the terms imposed by this ban. Apparently, many other people feel the same way, taking their chances buying their tobacco products online, or making regular trips to the European mainland to collect their maximum duty-free allowances.

If you are not in a position to do this personally, because you do not possess a car (or happen to harbour a particular animus towards the French), you may consider it to be highly discriminatory not to be allowed to pay someone else to do it for you, like, for instance, your friendly neighbourhood fags ‘n booze smuggler.

And if the major criminal gangs are now moving in on the act, that tells me at least two things. First, that they already have a huge, expanding customer base in the UK, and second, in a society that rates organised crime, with all its associated corruption and violence, as one of its greatest fears, we are opening up Pandora’s box with as little hope as Pandora of recapturing its demons.

Principle

What a mess. Do I deliberately break the law in pursuit of a moral principle, or do I jettison my principles in order to obey the law? Sure, we can break the law and buy smuggled tobacco products with relative ease, though I’m not advocating that anyone should.

Unlike the discredited bunch currently running the country (and I say this with sincere regret having been a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party), I’m not telling everybody else what they ought to do. You deal with your own moral quandaries, and I’ll deal with mine!

The Government has seriously overstepped the mark. Not only has it has compromised its claim to be an inclusive government, but it has acquiesced to the hectoring, bullying demands of an unrepresentative health clique, swallowed wholesale every ludicrous myth about smokers and smoking, and inflicted deep wounds on society and itself.

Hysteria

In the prevailing atmosphere of intolerance and hysteria, there seems little hope of any healing. We have not been fairly represented, therefore, I believe, that this government has compromised its right to collect tobacco tax, and that by continuing to do so will serve only to deepen the resentment and bitterness that so many of us feel.

If there was ever a social contract, guaranteeing personal freedoms as a condition of meeting our social responsibilities and duties as citizens, then in the case of many millions of citizens, the state has just torn up its part of that contract.

Robin Butler is a retired recruitment consultant and training officer who spends his enforced social exile at home in the company of his two similarly elderly cats