Rishi Sunak has vowed to defy the Conservative right-wing by pushing ahead with vaping and smoking bans

It’s not the right wing of anything being defied here, it’s good sense.

We’ve made clear our views on vaping recently - it works in reducing both smoking and teen smoking. Banning, even just restricting it, is therefore the act of fools. No, there is no justification.

There’s an explanation, for of course there is. Hayek pointed it out in Road to Serfdom. Give it long enough and if politics provides healthcare, directly provides it, then politics will be used to control us and our health. That’s not exactly disproven as a thesis now, is it?

As Chris Snowdon points out in detail, this isn’t even going to benefit the health of the nation nor the populace - it’s going to increase the size of the black market, that’s all.

The full announcement is here. Over and above the already mentioned problems, this particularly strikes us:

Five million disposable vapes are thrown away each week, up from 1.3 million from last year. Over a year this is equivalent to the lithium batteries of 5,000 electric vehicles.  

That’s about 50 tonnes of lithium a year even if we are to agree that it could, feasibly, be a problem. So, to “save” the equivalent of two lorry loads a year, 50 tonnes in a 100,000 tonne a year market, of a metal so cheap that mines are closing because they’re losing money, we’re going to expand the black market, harm the health of Britons and severely curtail that basic civil liberty of being able to do what the hell you want with your own body?

This has passed beyond the stage of being fools, they’re marching down the middle of the street with a chamberpot upon their head singing “Woot! Woot!”

Where is that necessary care in the community to teach them that the pot needs to be emptied before being used as a hat?