For governments, leaks are often an inconvenience at best and a crisis at worst. But Keir Starmer treated the revelation that Labour may soon ban outdoor smoking as an opportunity.
“My starting point on this is to remind everybody that over 80,000 people lose their lives every year because of smoking,” the Prime Minister remarked last week during his trip to Paris. “This is a preventable series of deaths and we’ve got to take action to reduce the burden on the NHS and the taxpayer.”
Starmer’s emphasis on preventable deaths wasn’t just a stock response – it reflected an underexplored part of his philosophy. “If anything defines Starmerism, it’s the belief that prevention is better than cure,” one government aide told me.
This isn’t a new agenda for the Labour leader. In a 2016 essay for the Fabian Society – published a year after he became an MP – Starmer wrote of how “our public services have increasingly become crisis services – dealing only with expensive end results, not preventing them from occurring in the first place”.
Now in government, he and Wes Streeting intend to shift health policy away from an overwhelming focus on sickness towards prevention. The proposed smoking ban is just one of a series of interventions: Labour has pledged to ban junk food and vape advertising to children; to prohibit the sale of high-caffeine energy drinks to under-16s; and to empower councils to block the opening of new fast food outlets near schools. Last week also saw the announcement of free “health MOTs” for middle-aged workers in an attempt to curb obesity and reduce deaths from heart attacks and strokes.
The “nanny state” – the cliché beloved of headline writers – doesn’t capture the ambition of this agenda. Think instead of the preventative state. In his Fabian essay, Starmer called for greater investment in social care, mental health treatment and children’s services (one of the tests of this government will be whether it delivers).
“To take an example from my old patch of criminal justice,” he wrote, “targeted long-term investment in children at primary school [and even younger] who are struggling because of the circumstances in which they are growing up [which often combines poverty, poor housing and domestic violence] will pay much better dividends in terms of crime prevention than building bigger prisons could ever do.”
Here is the kind of thinking that prompted the appointment of James Timpson – a champion of rehabilitation – as prisons minister. In terms perhaps more redolent of the film Minority Report, the party’s manifesto stated: “Local prevention partnerships will identify young people who could be drawn into violence and intervene”.
For Labour, prevention is partly a moral mission – “as we knew in 1945, much avoidable ill health can be prevented,” its manifesto declared – but it is also an economic one. By creating a healthier population, ministers aim to ease the financial burden on the NHS and to reduce the number out of work due to long-term sickness (which now stands at a debilitating 2.81 million). Success for Rachel Reeves, as much as for Streeting, depends on changing this.
But what of the politics? The popularity of the outdoor smoking ban (backed by 58 per cent of voters and opposed by 35 per cent) will come as no surprise to those who study public opinion. When Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick declared of Starmer last week – “this man does not understand our country” – he was precisely wrong. British voters love banning things – especially for other people. Labour’s most popular manifesto pledge? The ban on energy drinks for under-16s, supported by 78 per cent (in second place was the creation of GB Energy with 75 per cent).
This does not mean that there are no political risks for Labour. Given Britons’ penchant for bans, support of 58 per cent for the government’s smoking plan is relatively low and it is the intensity of opposition that matters as well as the scale.
There is also a risk, as I wrote last week, that Starmer’s Labour is typecast as joyless: warning of further economic hardship, taking money off pensioners, targeting people’s small pleasures. This isn’t an argument against an outdoor smoking ban – it’s worth remembering the last Labour government’s indoor ban was a remarkable political and policy success (the UK smoking rate fell from 21 per cent in 2008 to just 12.9 per cent today).
But Labour must juxtapose such negative interventions with positive ones. One politician who understood the importance of joy was Anthony Crosland. In his classic work The Future of Socialism (1956), the late Labour cabinet minister wrote: “We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafes”.
Keir Starmer wants the state to prevent harm but can he also show how it can enable joy?
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