Plain packaging may not work, but that's not the point

Can't say I have ever been a fan of Ian Paisley (whichever), but the logic in this piece is risible.

Maybe plain packaging on fags isn't going to stop them being bought. Maybe it will make smuggling easier if all branding is removed. I don't know. But that's not the point.

Of course it's the point. The author admits that the policy may not have its desired effect (indeed may have an adverse health outcome) once passed into law. But her message is that this doesn't matter: what matters is being politically on-message and knocking tobacco companies because 'reputable person' knows how bad smoking is.

But Nuala, really, what is the point of an anti-tobacco policy that assists the sale of illegal and even less safe cigarettes? What kind of a health outcome is that?

She argues that a campaign based on threats to jobs could be unethical because if all jobs mattered people could get paid to dangle babies over cliff tops for fun. Somehow laws are made to prevent such unethical forms of employment:

But that's why we have laws, isn't it? To impose a consensus about what's acceptable and what's not, on the general public.

That's not my understanding of a law: this is as much as to say that the government is there to tell us what to think, and tell us what our values should be. Impose a consensus? Can anyone advise where she learned that? Is it recognisable legal theory?


Nuala's conclusion?

Smoking belongs in the past. God help people who are addicted, it's hard to give up. But that doesn't mean we should keep making the things and profiting from another generation's misery. 

Having just declared that a growth in illicit sales doesn't really matter, this line of argument is hard to swallow.     Nuala clearly has gripes with the influence of Paisley when she mentions the burning of Irish flags (she may have a point there), but you don't need to support Paisley to realise that this is totalitarian nonsense of the first order.