Cigarette packaging rules: give the nanny state the boot

BRENDAN O’NEILL
MAY 7, 2016
THE AUSTRALIAN
There’s nothing like a bit of larrikinism to lift your spirits in these finger-wagging, freedom-squashing times.
On Wednesday I was reading about how the EU, the world’s biggest hive of naggers, has introduced stiff new rules for cigarette packaging. As of this month, 65 per cent of the front cover of cigarette packs will have to be adorned with health warnings. There’ll barely be space for the brand name. As a British comedian once quipped, soon smokers will have to say: “I’ll have a pack of 20 ‘SMOKING KILLS’, please.”
Under these rules smokers will be assaulted visually by even bigger photos of blackened lungs and deformed throats. These gory, graphic medical warnings sum up what the nanny state thinks of us: that we’re so dumb, so visceral, that the only way to get through to us is by showing us something bloody and horrible.
But then, also on Wednesday, within minutes of reading about the EU’s schoolmarm antics, I got an email from the great Bill Leak, this newspaper’s cartoonist, telling me his anti-nanny cigarette packets are now on sale.
Like all good larrikins, Bill rips the piss out of that layer of society which thinks that by dint of its background or its cupboard-load of useless PhDs it has the right to lecture the rest of us about how to parent, what to eat and basically how to become as thin, eco-friendly and dull as it is. And so it is with his ciggie covers.
The idea is that a smoker slips a cover over his cigarette pack so he has something more attractive to look at than an exploded heart or warnings of death. One of Bill’s covers shows Ned Kelly puffing a fag through his metal mask under the words: “MAN UP: You outgrew the nanny state when you stopped wetting the bed.” Another features Rodin’s Thinker, smoking, and the words: “Thinking Sticks: Einstein smoked and he was smarter than you.”
Boom — by slipping your fags into one of these cheeky covers you silence the nanny state; you drown out its constant, niggling whisper: “Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Be safe.” A cigarette pack once more becomes something nice to look at, a pleasure to fish out of your bag as you decide to puff on a Thinking Stick.
Leak’s larrikin strike against killjoys made me smile from ear to ear. The EU may want to make smokers feel bad and scared, as does the Australian government: tax hikes in this week’s budget mean a pack of fags in Oz will cost an eye-watering $40 by 2020. But Leak’s covers remind us that we can subvert killjoyism by defiantly enjoying the habits they hate.
Across the West, there are little rebellions against officialdom’s policing of our social and private lives. In 2004, Frank Field, a British Labour politician, unashamedly christened this new politics “the politics of behaviour”.
Politics has shifted, dramatically, from managing society to managing the blob (that’s us). The new politics was about “moderating behaviour and re-establishing the social virtues of self-discipline”, Field said. Where politics was once about what’s out there — the economy, work, social infrastructure — now it’s increasingly about what’s in here: in our lungs, our homes, our relationships.
It has taken hold across the West. Smoking in public has been banned almost everywhere. New York bans smoking in parks. Booze is demonised. Scotland recently brought in minimum pricing for alcohol, or what John Stuart Mill called a “sin tax”, designed to punish financially those who like a tipple.
Petty regulations are proliferating like anti-social weeds, governing everything from who can work with kids to who can sell cakes on the street. Officials in both Oz and Britain are clamping down on junk food in schools. In Britain we call them the Tuckshop Taliban, after they shut down tuckshops that were selling such contraband items as Mars bars.
Night-life is under constant assault. The NSW government imposes lockouts, preventing adults from partying as they see fit. In Britain, the pub, that hub of social life for centuries, is in crisis. About 29 pubs a week are closing down, and that’s partly down to smoking bans, tough rules about age checks and weird closing-time regulations, all of which zap the spark from pub life.
Anyone who doubts the tyranny of the politics of behaviour should consider Britain’s Nudge Unit. It’s charged with coming up with ways to “nudge” Brits towards healthier, greener living. It says officials should behave as people’s “surrogate willpower”, making choices on our behalf and “guiding” us towards them. Surrogate willpower: that’s the definition of Orwellianism. These people want to be our actual minds.
But there are uprisings. Some small, some big, all important. From Leak’s cigarette covers to the British mums who caused a stir by shoving chips through the schoolgates to feed their kids who didn’t like the new healthy school grub; from Keep Sydney Open, which challenges lockout laws, to those Londoners who responded to Boris Johnson’s ban on drinking booze on the Tube by having a boozy party on the Tube; from the British schoolkids I interviewed for the BBC a few years ago about their secretive selling of sweets in the playground to the rise of ostentatiously decadent hipster food — people have had a gutful of the nannies, nudgers and naggers and are breaking their rules.
As they should. For this politics of behaviour is not simply irritating overreach by a few officials. No, it represents a reversal of the Enlightenment, a reworking of the relationship between the state and the individual in favour of the state. The Enlightenment, in John Locke’s words, was an attempt to “settle the bounds” between the business of government and the rights of the individual. Locke, writing in 1689, said the authorities should not compel people to believe certain things, or even to be healthy.
In 1784, in his searing essay What is Enlightenment?, Imman­uel Kant went further. That essay is, in essence, a revolt against the nanny state.
Kant complained of having “a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet”, which means “I have no need to exert myself”. These “guardians” treat people like “cattle”, he said, making us view “the step to maturity, not only as hard, but as extremely dangerous”.
And that’s exactly what we have today, again. Nudge units that think for us, parenting gurus who parent for us, therapists who emote for us. The class of paternalists the Enlightenment sought to overthrow is back with a vengeance. So let the fightback continue and intensify. Let’s heed Kant’s words: “walk firmly” and “cultivate your own mind”. And Leak’s words too: “You outgrew the nanny state when you stopped wetting the bed.”