Smoking, smacking, smartphones for kids: never mind the “nanny state,” today’s national debate seems crowded with demands for decisive action from politicians to save us – or our children – from ourselves.
Rishi Sunak’s ban on selling cigarettes to under-15s for ever once they come of age is supported by 59% of the public, according to one recent poll.
He has been unabashed about defending the tough policy, despite some of his more libertarian colleagues – including the business secretary Kemi Badenoch – claiming it is an infringement on personal freedom, and one, Don Valley MP Nick Fletcher, fretting that “nanny states do not raise warriors”.
Meanwhile, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, whose MPs backed the tobacco bill in the House of Commons this week, previously embraced the term “nanny state” when confronting objections to Labour’s policy of supervised tooth-brushing for children.
“The moment you do anything on child health, people say ‘You’re going down the road of the nanny state.’ We want to have that fight,” Starmer said, earlier this year.
And polling of parents concerned about the impact of smartphone use on their children’s mental health suggests almost 60% support a ban for under-16s.
Meanwhile, leading doctors banded together this week to urge the government to ban smacking children in England and Northern Ireland.
Prof John Coggon, of Bristol University, who specialises in the law around public health, says policies aimed at children are not really the “nanny state”. Instead, the phrase refers to measures to protect adults – whether they like it or not.
While aimed at children, Starmer’s willingness to embrace the term “nanny state” seems telling, however. And polling suggests both he and Sunak are on solid political ground.
The term “nanny state” was popularised in political debate by the. Conservative MP Iain Macleod in the 1960s in relation to paternalistic legislation – including the 70mph speed limit on motorways, which he called “perishing nonsense”.
Debate around such policies has often been fierce. Tony Blair gave his MPs a free vote on Labour’s ban on smoking indoors in 2006, in the face of objections from colleagues including the cabinet minister John Reid.
“What enjoyment does a 21-year-old single mother of three living in a council sink estate get? The only enjoyment sometimes they have is to have a cigarette,” Reid had said two years earlier, when health secretary.
Coggon says the overwhelming support today for policies that were hard-fought at the time, such as the indoor smoking ban and compulsory seatbelts, shows that it can be hard to judge measures in the moment.
“I’m old enough that when I started studying law as an undergraduate, smoking bans were given as an example of laws you couldn’t enact, because they said, ‘You could all pass a law saying you can’t smoke in public places, but people would just carry on anyway,’” he says.
“When we’re trying to judge this, we need to recognise that really it’s to be judged in the future: we’re not actually in a position to do that yet, and people will have changed how they think about things.”
Ironically, the British prime minister who found himself imposing the most draconian public health legislation in peacetime, Boris Johnson, saw himself as the very opposite of a “nanny state” politician – despite, or perhaps partly because of, himself having had a nanny.
His antipathy for Covid lockdown measures was evident even as he announced them. Public compliance was nevertheless high, if not in No 10. But the legacy of those decisions has been complex and long-lasting. Johnson has called Sunak’s smoking policy “nuts”.
Christopher Snowden, head of lifestyle economics at the libertarian thinktank the Institute for Economic Affairs, says there was growing public acceptance of restrictive policies long before Covid.
“The median individual is definitely more prone to banning things than they were 10 or 20 years ago. That’s partly because there’s endless chatter about banning things. If it’s not politicians saying they want to ban things, it’s some campaign group,” he says. “There’s probably roughly 30% who’d ban anything – anything you asked about, they’d ban.”
Stefan Stern, a management expert whose latest book is called How to: Be a Better Leader, says voters can sometimes welcome the appearance of decisive action. “I would say there does seem to be some appetite on occasion – and this is where the judgment comes in – for the appearance of control, the illusion of order. It’s comforting,” he says.
He adds that it is not always obvious where to draw the line. Backing for a smoking ban does not necessarily read across to other areas of health and social policy, such as obesity or gambling: “It’s a fine judgment.”
Pollsters say the “strength” of politicians has become an increasingly salient characteristic in recent years, perhaps boosting the political dividends from appearing to act decisively.
The sheer scale of the challenges currently facing the NHS – and the resulting costs for taxpayers – may also have helped to soften public concerns about policies that might once have been considered draconian.
But the backlash over Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emission zone in London – a tax, not a ban – underlines how fierce the reaction can be when some feel their freedom is infringed.
It remains to be seen whether Sunak’s tobacco bill feeds a flourishing hidden market in illicit cigarettes, as today’s under-15s come of age.
But for the moment at least, the public appears willing to accept that when it comes to smoking at least, nanny knows best.
