FAG PHOBIA

Neil Clark says that the real problem with New

Labour is that no one in the administration has ever smoked a Woodbine

OF course it's a matter of individual freedom; of a minority pursuit that should be allowed even though many may regard it as disgusting, out of date and out of place in 21st-century Britain. We have heard these arguments plenty of times in the Daily Telegraph in recent months in relation to foxhunting; but what of their relevance to another minority activity under attack from the present government: smoking?

Fifty-four years ago, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, was exhorting British citizens to 'smoke your cigarettes right down to the butt — it might even be good for you'. Now, we are saddled with quite easily the most tabagophobic government in our history — a Labour administration, none of whose members has ever smoked a Woodbine in their lives. Under New Labour, taxes on tobacco have risen to more than 80 per cent of their sale price, easily the highest such duties anywhere in the world.

A bill to ban tobacco advertising, proudly trumpeted in the Labour manifesto, is set to become law later this year, and, if Kevin Barron, the fanatical anti-smoking MP for Rother Valley, gets his way, total prohibition of smoking in one's workplace may soon follow. The way things are heading, it can be only a matter of time before New Labour follows California's example and proposes a ban on smoking in all public places.

How is it that this once great political party, a natural home for smokers for the best part of a century, has come to such a sorry state? Easy, chime Blair's babes and New Labour propagandists: the government is taking such a hardline stance on smoking because it cares so passionately about our health. Reverend Tony's compassion extends not just to Kosovar Albanians, downtrodden Afghan women and the rights of Iraqis to multiparty democracy and a free-market economy, but also to the health of citizens back home. For that reason he has declared war not just on terrorism, drugs and crime, but on cancer, too, and on the dreadful substance he believes to be its major cause. Quite simply, our deeply humanitarian government

desires a smoke-free Britain so that we can all live to a ripe old age free from emphysema, lung cancer and other tobaccoinduced nasties, Call me cynical, but I don't believe a word of it. Far from improving the nation's health, many of this government's policies (the selling-off of school playing-fields, to give one example) have actually done the opposite. The two big health problems of Millennium Britain — obesity and bingedrinking — have only got worse under New Labour, while diseases long since banished from these Isles, such as tuberculosis, have, because of the government's chaotic asylum policy, once again reared their ugly heads. No government that allows its party conference to be sponsored by Mcdonald's and permits that company to open outlets in Britain's schools and hospitals can seriously claim to be acting in the interests of the nation's health. If we are to find the real reasons behind New Labour's relentless hostility to tobacco-smoking, we clearly have to look further than altruism.

Two reasons, I believe, present themselves. The first is rather obvious and is becoming apparent to more and more people up and down the land: namely that we have a government of quite unprecedented bossiness; a government that tells immigrants what language to speak in their own homes; that wants to monitor and read our private emails; and, through innovations such as 'Benefit Fraud Hotline', encourages us to snoop, East-German style, on our next-door neighbours.

The second reason is more ideological and involves closer analysis of Labour party history. From its formation in 1900, the Labour party and La Diva Nicotina danced hand in hand for the best part of a century. Just nine years before the Labour party was founded, the great tobacco entrepreneur Sir William Wills had introduced the Woodbine to the market, a move that revolutionised cigarette-smoking in Britain. Priced at a penny for five cigarettes, Woodbines made smoking accessible to all, and the brand soon became a class totem of the working man.

As cigarette-smoking increased in popularity, so, too, did the fortunes of the Labour party and the philosophy it espoused. During the first world war, the cigarette, against the background of trench warfare and mass slaughter, came into its own as an agent of human bonding; becoming, in the words of the tobacco historian Ian Gately, a 'currency of compassion among fellow sufferers'. The shared cigarette before 'going over the top' provided the 'last example of civility before savagery, calm before storm, kindness before brutality', while the offer of a cigarette to the enemy, be it at a Christmas ceasefire or when taking prisoners, was an acknowledgment of common humanity.

Smoking had, because of the war, become a symbol of internationalism and goodwill towards all men sentiments that were completely in line with the Labour party's ethos and helped it on the road to power. It is surely no coincidence that 1924, the year when Ramsay MacDonald formed the first Labour government, annual consumption of tobacco products in Britain had, for the first time, surpassed 70,000 tons. It is also significant that the year 1948, regarded by many as the high-water mark of 20th-century British socialism, was the year when Britain registered the highest percentage of smokers in its history (82 per cent) and indeed the highest in the world. Never again in Britain did either socialism or smoking scale such heights.

Mass Observation's 1948 survey on smoking discovered that the main reason given for the habit was 'bonding'. Smoking was first and foremost a social activity that uniquely transcended boundaries of class, religion and sex. The common practice of sharing one's packet of smokes when in company was fully in tune with the kinder, more affiliative spirit of the age. And therein, for me. lies the main reason why New Labour detests the tobacco habit so much.

The New Labour of Mandelson and Blair draws its inspiration not from the warm, sociable atmosphere of smoke-filled working-men's clubs and dance halls of the 1940s, but from an altogether more sanitised and less friendly environment: the 1990s America of focus groups, smoking bans and lawsuits against tobacco companies. New Labour takes its cue from Stockton, CA, not from the smoky old Stockton-on-Tees of half a century ago. In short. the New Labour modernisers hate smoking because it is so old-fashioned, socially conservative, Old Labour and reminiscent of a long-gone Britain which they completely despise.

As A.N. Wilson has correctly stated, for all Blair's periodic attacks on the forces of conservatism, The Prime Minister reserves his real odium for the benign traditions of his own party' — its historical tolerance of tobacco being a clear example. For Blair and his babes, 'modernising' the Labour party means not just ditching Clause Four, free school meals and redistributive taxation, but stubbing out the fags, too. It is surely significant that Tony Benn, the man who has consistently fought this 'modernising' agenda and is to many the personification of all that was good and honourable about Old Labour, is an inveterate and unrepentant smoker.

In New Labour's League Table of Sin, smoking comes right at the top, well ahead of both adultery and teenage homosexuality. Two years ago, at the very time the government was lowering the homosexual age of consent to 16, it was embarking on a 'crusade' against teenage smoking. Matt's wonderful Daily Telegraph cartoon, showing two teenage homosexuals in bed, ecstatic after sex, but bemoaning the lack of a post-coital cigarette, spoke volumes about our government's priorities.

New Labour's tabagophobia has also, I

believe, coloured its thinking on important foreign-policy issues. During the war with Yugoslavia three years ago, government sources stated that President Milosevic's predilection for cigars and whisky made him 'unfit to govern'. Whatever would they have said about Winston Churchill? One year earlier, the then foreign secretary Robin Cook showed his anti-smoking prejudices when castigating Saddam Hussein for importing glass ashtrays into Iraq. The editor of The Spectator asks what Robert Mugabe has to do to receive the serious biffings both Slobo and Saddam have already been given by New Labour, but on all the evidence so far it really does seem that, unless the Zimbabwean dictator develops a penchant for Monte Cristo No. 2s, he should be able to avoid air-strikes.

Back home anti-smoking fanaticism has also had several undesirable consequences. Instead of concentrating resources on apprehending the smugglers of hard drugs such as crack cocaine and heroin, £1 billion a year of taxpayers' money is now being spent on tackling tobacco smuggling. As Customs officials target the likes of Alan and Pauline Andrews and their car brimful of Silk Cut cartons, Mr Big breezes through the arrivals lounge unmolested. Our teenagers, forcefed a diet of horror stories about tobacco-smoking, move instead into the far more dangerous world of designer drugs and binge-drinking. Fifty years ago, discontented youths would smoke Players Medium; in New Labour Britain it's ten pints of lager and half a gram of snow.

Tony Blair and his colleagues are very keen to use similes of Nazi Germany when dealing with those who stand in their way; Saddam Hussein being the second 'New Hitler' to have come along in the last three years. But in his relentless propaganda against tobacco and his complete intolerance towards smokers, Blair is directly aping the 'modernisers' of the Third Reich and its virulently anti-smoking leader. By 1939, Nazi Germany's anti-tobacco programmes included a total ban on smoking in public places, on all forms of public transport and among the members of the Luftwaffe. In Berlin, all smoking out of doors was banned. In Britain at the same time there were no restrictions on smoking whatsoever. I know which of these societies I'd prefer to live in, but does Mr Blair?