Of course smoking is bad for you - but that doesn't mean we should ban it

I only ever saw my mum smoke on Christmas Eve. We would have our neighbours round for mince pies and sherry and my mother would produce a box of 20 Silk Cut cigarettes to hand out to her guests. I actually remember it with some nostalgia, certainly not as something that was wrong, it was of a social norm in the late 1970s for tobacco to be passed around as readily as after dinner mints.

She would the sit by the fireplace and smoke beneath my Christmas Stocking. As the neighbours each lit up, I would watch through those dainty skeins of smoke becoming great, big billowing clouds that hid the shape of their grown-up conversation from view.

As I learned more about the harmful effects of smoking, mum’s sly festive fag somehow felt more illicit. I remember my sister and I coming home from school, stealing the cigarettes from where she kept them above the chest of drawers and hiding them. Initially that was our own little private campaign to try and get her to quit. In later years it became more about personal experimentation and learning how to smoke a fag ourselves.

People smoking cigarettes while sitting outdoors at a restaurant, in Soho, London | PA

That all seems like a different world now. The public health understanding of smoking and passive smoking make such scenes almost impossible to imagine and how we reduce both smoking and exposure to second hand smoke is rightly still at the top of the political agenda.

The UK government now wants to legislate to gradually increase the age of sale for cigarettes, meaning it would be illegal to sell tobacco to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009. In short, they hope to create a smoke-free generation and, ultimately, eliminate cigarettes for good. The plans also include extending the indoor smoking ban to some outdoor settings.

Smoking is, undoubtedly, a bad habit and a deeply damaging addiction. So, the question is not whether smoking is harmful, but how far we should go to prevent those harms. And when our Scottish party conference debated the government’s plans several months ago, it was an incredibly interesting and rich discussion that went right to the heart of what we mean when we talk about liberalism.

As Liberal Democrats, the clue is, of course, in the name. We’re not big fans of ‘banning’ things. But it becomes a little trickier when the thing you are proposing to ban is causing some kind of harm. And harm to whom? To the individual, to society, or to both?

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill wrote: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” This idea, that individuals should be free to act as they wish so long as their actions do not impact adversely on others, has come to be known as the harm principle.

That principle places an important and reasonable caveat on what we understand as freedom. It prevents the concept of freedom from being devalued as something more unbridled, more anarchic. It is a good principle; it led to Liberal Democrats in Scotland supporting the ban on smoking indoors and championing the bill to ban smoking in cars with children. But that principle is also why members of my party voted against the plans to introduce a rolling age on the sale of cigarettes.

By taking away the right of an adult to choose whether or not to smoke, the ‘only purpose’ is no longer to ‘prevent harm to others’. By taking away that right, you are impinging more on the freedoms of the individual than you are protecting the freedoms of others.

To illustrate this point, let’s turn to the argument that the decision to smoke does cause harm to others by placing an extra burden on the NHS. This is, however, a dangerous logic that could open the floodgates for bans on a great number of things. If we are targeting behaviours that cost the health service, why not extend a ban to junk food? Or sugary drinks? Or sedentary lifestyles? Or stressful jobs? By that logic, our freedoms would be shut down on a massive and, crucially, illiberal scale.

In practice, this ban could create a situation where a 61-year-old would be refused tobacco, while a 62-year-old could smoke freely. It could give rise to a two-tier system of rights for adults based solely on an arbitrary age limit. We could also find ourselves faced with a black market of potentially dangerous, unregulated tobacco products, not to mention the administrative nightmare of enforcement and monitoring.

There is an essential sense of fairness that underpins Mill’s harm principle. That fairness defines so much of how my party endeavours to look at the world around us. And so, while we oppose the ban on escalating the age limit, we support the proposed restrictions on smoking outdoors.

There is evidence that passive smoking, in outdoor areas where ventilation is limited (for example, in doorways) can cause harm to others. In Scotland, we already have restrictions on smoking outside hospitals, and these rules would extend the restrictions to outside schools and children’s playgrounds. Indeed, restrictions like these could build on the successes of those from which they stem, particularly the indoor smoking ban. This measure has contributed to cigarette use falling from roughly 45 per cent of the population in 1974 to around 12 per cent today.

My party also want to see the new UK government introducing a levy on tobacco company profits to help fund healthcare and smoking cessation services. That’s another way we can reach a more sensible middle ground, allowing people the choice while also taking steps to tackle the harms to others.

So, let’s not create two sets of rights for adults of differing age, as a rolling age ban would do - it wrests away too much freedom from the individual, and I’m not entirely sure it works. We should, instead, be respecting the choices of the individual, even when we disagree or know they are making a mistake, and ensuring they work alongside the rights of others.

• Alex Cole-Hamilton is leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats party