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Britain’s ‘smoke-free generation’ law may save lives, but it also reveals a government legislating for habits young people have largely grown out of.
The British government has hailed its generational smoking ban as a landmark public health intervention. Anyone born after 1st January 2009 will never legally be able to buy cigarettes in the UK, theoretically creating a ‘smoke-free generation’ that will phase tobacco out of British life forever.
It’s an easy win politically. Smoking remains one of the country’s leading causes of preventable death, and no serious politician wants to publicly defend Big Tobacco. Fewer people smoking is undeniably a good thing. It will save millions from cancer, heart disease and emphysema, while also stripping smoking of the cultural glamour it once possessed.
But there’s one other crucial detail that makes this new law far less ambitious than it claims to be: very few young people in Britain smoke cigarettes anymore.
The ban arrives precisely at the moment young people are turning to other forms of nicotine, most often vapes but also nicotine pouches – known as ‘snus’ in Scandinavia, where they were first popularised.
Thanks to the marketing of these alternative products, and their relative subtlety (they don’t give of a strong smell like traditional cigarettes, and can often be consumed indoors without notice) young people are getting addicted to nicotine from a much earlier age.
The NHS reported in 2024 that 1 in 10 secondary school pupils in the UK smoke vapes frequently. Introducing a cigarette ban is a decisive decision, granted, but it’s also belated. The state is targeting a cultural behaviour that younger people have already begun abandoning of their own accord.
Smoking was once a popular recreational activity with cultural cachet. But it’s slowly been dying out for gen z, many of whom considered it gauche and outdated by the early 2010s. That trend may be shifting once again, as some hail the ‘return of cigarettes’ in popular culture.
But this feels more like a rebellion against recent anti-cigarette legislation and the growing health concerns emerging around vapes. Cigarettes also remain the domain of older members of gen z and millennials, with school-age children turning to vapes and pouches for ease of access and consumption.
Sam Kriss describes Britain’s complex relationship with the cigarette as a distinctly cultural issue. ‘The iconic British smokers are all older, paunchier types, and most of them went for something with a bit more gravitas than a cigarette,’ Kriss writes.
‘There are very few teen-agers desperate to look like Bertrand Russell. Even the cigarette brands are a little grotty [in the UK].’
The new smoking ban is also the latest in a long line of anti-smoking legislation aimed at Britain’s young people. In 1908, the UK was one of the first countries in the world to restrict the sale of tobacco for under sixteens. And again in 2007, a nation-wide smoking ban outlawed indoor smoking and the sale of tobacco to anyone under the age of eighteen.
