Back in the halcyon days of the pending ID Cards legislation we could rely on the Lords, whatever the futility, to take a robust approach to individual and civil liberties against an increasingly intrusive, not to say megalomaniacal, panopticon state in the Commons.
No longer.For all that he was vilified at the time, to the extent that he quit economics entirely for many years and became a full-time social scientist, Hayek's predictions in
The Road to Serfdom are, once again, spot on. His premise was that collectivism, however nobly or benignly envisaged, slides inexorably towards totalitarianism. Give a person or a group of people responsibility for a decision that would otherwise be taken subconsciously by the dispersed, tacit knowledge of the market, and arbitration - that is to say, the taking of decisions based on considered criteria whose importance and relevance have, necessarily, been considered and, as it were, ranked by importance by the committee or individual - is inevitable. In the situation that arises, not only is it possible that a decision could be influenced by one who stands to benefit in a manner that would be impossible in a genuine free market, but also thereby the currying of favour and influence becomes institutionalised. Decisions must thereafter be defended to those who lose out by them. Unpopular ones must be enforced. And soon enough the possibility is raised that so much
good is being done, though it be against the will of
hoi misguided
polloi, that it might be too much of a risk to bother with an election this year.
Fortunately we had one just last year (although don't expect another until the last possible moment once Gordon Brown gets his hands on his birthright in that "smooth and orderly transition of power" that we're all excited about - and who wouldn't be, given that we haven't seen power transferred in this manner since the fall of the Roman Empire. It'll be like a political Haley's Comet, but much more infrequent), so in fairness I can't really consider the smoking ban totalitarian, as such. But there's an interesting angle to it.
In the end, the best reason they've got for the ban is one of money. A proponent (say a junior Labour minister, greasily ambitious) might suggest to you that the majority favours a ban on smoking, and that it should be done for that reason. To that, I would only point out that by every poll on the issue ever conducted, a majority of Britons favours a return to capital punishment (I am not one of them, except perhaps for treason) but there hasn't exactly been a legislative stampede on the issue; and that a majority of Britons (to return to my favourite hobby horse for a second) looks askance upon the idea of an MP elected to a Scottish seat becoming Prime Minister, passing (as he would) laws that affect his own constituents not one whit on a number of issues, yet Gordon Brown continues impatiently to go through the motions of Chancellorship with that colossal air of entitlement. That grinning junior minister might thereafter suggest that it's all being done to protect the non-smoker, to which I would remark that he shows remarkably little faith in the intelligence and autonomy of the typical non-smoker if he doesn't believe him to be capable of taking the choice to remove himself from a situation if he considers it harmful. Similarly he (our apparatchik, not our non-smoker) might choose to defend the rights of the barmaid or waiter, as though an entire industry were in fact being chained behind bars in smoky pubs and forced to pour drinks, or blackmailed into serving food for a living.
Then, perhaps, his face might light up. "Ah!" he might say, "but think of the amount of money it will save the NHS!" This, of course, will have been saved up, as a bone to throw the small-government types who believe that the amount of money poured down the various black holes that constitute the NHS has passed from the outrageous to the simply farcical, a good source of black humour on a Monday morning. Even assuming the accuracy of such a statement (as opposed, say, to making the point that perhaps it will just cost the catering and pub industries a shitload of cash while all the smokers stay home and
smoke fuckin' more, blackening their lungs at the same rate as they would have before, except maybe now they won't be walking to the pub), there are still sound reasons to laugh it out of court.
The NHS is funded by taxpayers, and I have no doubt that when it was envisaged and instituted it was with the most benign and compassionate motives. (Who could argue, after all, with the extension to all of access to quality healthcare previously only enjoyed by the idle rich? Not even I could, although it must be said that the NHS of 1948 would be unrecognisable to a doctor from that time were he to walk into a hospital run by today's superannuated, sclerotic, politically wracked and desperately sluggish organisation.) But fast forward 60 years, and now it's a reason to intrude further in people's lives. First we are taxed to fund the body, then, in order to save us our own money that they confiscated, our lives are subject to ever-higher degrees of control and scrutiny. The existence of nationalised healthcare begets the notion of nationalised health. Since they make us pay for one thing, they have the moral authority to make us stop doing another. Classic mission creep, and exactly the kind of thing Hayek foresaw without actually predicting.
