"Starmer will force pub landlords to do his dirty work while making their businesses and livelihoods unviable," says Royston Smith
Royston Smith is the former Conservative MP for Southampton, Itchen
Remember ‘Stay at home to protect the NHS?’
During the most terrifying time in our lives, we were told not to take risks in order to protect the National Health Service, the very service set up over 75 years ago to protect us. It was a bit like asking burglars to stay at home to protect the police.
Sir Keir Starmer is now planning to ban smoking in open spaces to help relieve the pressure on the NHS. On the back of inflation-busting pay rises for NHS workers, with no requirement to increase productivity or improve the service to patients, we are now told the reason to ban smoking outside is to help prop up our struggling NHS.
Starmer’s latest authoritarian diktat might be welcomed by many, particularly nonsmokers, of which I am one, but we ought to be alarmed at his direction of travel. What is he going to ban next? McDonald’s? Iceland frozen pizzas? Calorie-busting dinners in Labour-supporting restaurateur, Tom Kerridges’, Hand and Flowers pub?
We’re constantly infantilised by governments but this one, in its two short months in office, is shaping up to be the most Orwellian yet. I warned the last government, if they continued to offer a watered-down form of socialism the voters would choose the real thing, and now they have. But did they really know what they were choosing?
Because of the self-inflicted damage of the last Conservative Government, and the Reform Party’s pathological dislike of them, we are left with Sir Keir Starmer and his all-controlling hard-left government.
Centre-right parties in the UK did this to themselves. Nigel Farage says he will never go to a pub again if smoking outside is banned. What did he think a Starmer government would look like? He actively campaigned knowing full well Sir Keir Starmer and a Labour Government would be the result and now we are all reaping what he sowed.
I said to voters during the general election campaign, “Don’t enjoy punishing the Conservatives for a few hours when the election results are announced only to spend the next five years punishing yourself.” This is what the next five years are going to look like.
What is truly awful about this controlling policy is who will have to implement it. It will fall on our pub landlords. In the year to March 2024, pubs were closing in this country at a rate of 80 per month. By banning smoking outside and in beer gardens even more will be under pressure, as the likes of Nigel Farage refuse to use them again. Starmer will force pub landlords to do his dirty work while making their businesses and livelihoods unviable.
The police have all but given up prosecuting those carrying or using Class A drugs, but pub landlords will no doubt be prosecuted by the Labour Government if they don’t enforce Starmer’s outdoor smoking ban.
The most expensive health issue facing the NHS is caused by obesity, not smoking. But there are too many of those to go after. Many of the people being treated for comorbidities (multiple conditions) are overweight. Is Starmer going to ban pub food? Is he going to force people to take the new weight loss wonder drug, Ozempic?
If the Labour Government is to ban things that make people unwell rather than fix a health system which cannot cope pretty soon we’ll be locked down again only this time it will be without alcohol.
If the nanny state continues at this rate, we will soon be sending our kids to school wrapped in bubble wrap, wearing a hard hat and safety shoes while sucking in pure oxygen through high tech breathing apparatus. Why? - to protect the NHS of course.
