Welshing on personal responsibility

Wednesday June 8, 2011

Tom Miers reads the Welsh Assembly Government’s ‘Action Plan’ on tobacco and laments the ever-growing intrusiveness of bureaucracies large and small

The Welsh Assembly Government’s Draft Tobacco Control Action Plan for Wales should be preserved in a glass bottle and buried deep into the concrete foundations of the Senedd building.

Centuries hence it can be dug up and presented in that era’s version of A History of the World in 100 Objects as an exemplar of 21st Century governance. It is replete with that slightly-out-of-date management speak that mimics so teasingly the consultancy language of the late 1990’s.

It is full of meanigless exhortations to other government agencies to implement vague plans that, if followed, would require the recruitment of implementation officers to monitor stakeholder engagement.

The NHS is to be burdened with new and vague targets. The police and courts must be entangled with imprecise persecution of small retailers.

Local government must already be rubbing its hands with glee – those dreaded cuts can be staved off with the new staff required to imlement the Action Plan.

Young Welsh entrepreneurs should surely consider the sign making industry. Think of all those bilingual plaques warning smokers away from hospital car parks and municipal playgrounds!

A secondary career option would be political PR, or public affairs. The Welsh Assembly Government is to lobby Westminster on reserved matters – hiking taxes, banning this, restricting that. Thus is the principle of devolution – that the assembly is there to focus on devolved policy, leaving Westminster MPs to do the rest – blithely ignored.

But the most striking elelment in the document is its starting premise. With a jarring change of linguistic tone – from bland bureau-speak to petulant passion – the introduction announces the philosophical basis for the Action Plan:

“Creating a product that makes children and teenagers addicted and then arguing that it is their free choice to be addicted is an argument to be rejected outright. In the UK two thirds of adults who have ever smoked say that they started before they were 18.”

Alongside the familiar claim that smoking costs the NHS money (amazing how nonsense like this can be peddled by government despite being disproved many times over), this statement is the main basis for the renewed demonisation of smokers.

So flawed in logic and sentiment is this argument that it is difficult to know where to start in disputing it concisely.

Ludicrously, the statement seems to imply that for those smokers who started in adulthood, no government action is justified in discouraging them. One looks in vain for the mechanism by which the Action Plan will be applied selectively.

But for those who started in childhood, the outlook is bleak. These smokers are smoking against their will. The statement clearly implies that they are being forced to smoke. If that is the case, this is surely a new departure in jurisprudence. These victims of torture are not to be protected by criminal prosecution of their tormentors, but by woolly instructions to local government.

One of the inherent problems with government regulation is that it infantilises the public by implying that they cannot look after themselves. It encourages a feeling in society that we do not need to take responsibility for ourselves or our dependants because the government is there to make decisions for us.

Worse, it interferes with the relationship between infantilised parents and the real children they are supposed to be looking after. By the logic of this document any harmful activity started in childhood and continued into adulthood merits government intervention. Since many such habits are picked up and continued for cultural and social reasons – eating sausages, for instance, or believing in Father Christmas – the scope for state meddling is almost without limit.

The Welsh Action Plan parrots those cries for bans on smoking in the home and the car. Yet we know that the state makes a dreadful parent. What impudence to drive smokers away from public places only to lecture them on how best to look after their children!

Government has always been adept at poking its nose into other people’s business. Yet despite its manifest cruelties and contradictions, government activism has undeniably grown in recent decades. And whatever their claims to accountability, the creation of the new devolved bureaucracies has hastened this lamentable process.

Tom Miers is editor of the Free Society