True Tories can’t ban smoking and also be pro assisted dying

Parliamentary votes on matters of conscience cross party lines and are rooted in ideas of non-political philosophy that MPs can rarely exhibit, as with the assisted dying Bill debate on Friday. It was curious that four Conservative MPs who supported that Bill – Alicia Kearns, the shadow home affairs minister, Neil Shastri-Hurst, a doctor and barrister, Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, and Victoria Atkins, the shadow secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs – also voted three days earlier to restrict progressively the age at which people can legally buy cigarettes and vapes, allegedly to wipe out smoking.

Of course it will do nothing of the sort, any more than penal taxation of tobacco products has. There is the impossibility of accurately telling someone’s age; and, as for decades, illegal supplies will be smuggled from Europe and sold to anyone who wants them. But did our philosophers ask themselves this: if as Conservatives they applied their consciences in a way that allowed them to support legalised assisted death, should they prevent people slowly killing themselves over decades by smoking tobacco?

Some will argue that in the first case people are in pain with horrible terminal illnesses. But life itself is a terminal illness. If you are going to allow people help from medical professionals to kill themselves when life becomes unbearable, why should they not, when old enough to vote or to die in the service of the King, be allowed to start killing themselves then, given no one apart from the educationally sub-normal can be under the impression that smoking does not damage your health?

One cannot dictate matters of conscience, and these four MPs were perfectly within their rights to support assisted dying. But there is a profound, and deeply illiberal, contradiction in their determination to stop people whose minds, undisturbed by the misery of pain and serious suffering, are clear enough to choose to accelerate their progress to the grave by smoking. (For the avoidance of doubt: I write as one who has never smoked anything in his life.)

But then other Conservative MPs over the decades have revealed moral confusion over legislation affecting the lives of their fellow Britons. In any number of debates from the 1950s onwards, some of those who actively supported abortion, and quite a liberal policy on abortion at that, also actively opposed capital punishment. They were quite prepared to sanction the killing of healthy, innocent, unborn children whose only crime was to be conceived, while preventing the killing, after a fair trial by jury, of vicious murderers who had killed premeditatedly, often for gain or for sexual gratification. (For the avoidance of doubt again: I write as a lifelong atheist.)

The philosophical conflict these four MPs have exposed within themselves follows in that more established tradition. One is unlikely ever to construct a political party in this or any other democracy where, whatever the moral considerations, everyone thinks consistently and logically about them. What both Bills last week had in common, outside their considerable moral dimension, was a deeper interference by the state in the lives of individuals.

Mrs Badenoch, as Leader of the Opposition, set what many Conservatives would consider the correct example by voting against the two Bills. It is not so much rolling back the state as bulldozing it back that must underpin the Conservatives’ preparation for their next spell in government – both out of necessity and to atone for their abject failure to do it in their 14 benighted years of power.

Those who voted for either measure, let alone both, should reflect deeply on where precisely such aggrandising of the state and lengthening of its tentacles may lead.