Labour's obsession with bans is almost Puritanical.

 

I think the smoking ban in pubs that was introduced by the Blair New Labour government, was generally a good thing and I don't think there are many British people nowadays, who would like to see the ban revoked. If you were in a pub and you didn't smoke, breathing in somebody's cigarette smoke, was bloody awful. 

As a libertarian, I don't really care much for government bans and I don't really think they necessarily work. Alcohol prohibition in America was a total failure and led to an increase in boot legging, illegal drinking dens, and gang crime. 

When I growing up, the legal age for smoking was 16 and the legal age at which you could buy an alcoholic drink in a pub, was 18. None of us took much notice of those age restrictions and we took great delight in flouting the law and dodging the police. I have been a recusant for much of my adult life and deference isn't one of my strong points. A hatred of authority is something that I had knocked into me at secondary school. 

I think that Nigel Farage is right about one thing. The Starmer Labour government does have a stench of middle-class self-righteous Puritanism about it, and is always wanting to ban something. Like the Puritans, Labour is also obsessed with work. They now want to ban crossbows. It will be catapults next and the licensing of airguns. 

Labour's Online Safety Act, is meant to restrict children's access to certain websites and they now want to deny children under 16, from having access to the internet but want to give 16-year-olds the vote. Many young people in Britain have been using smart phones and tablets since childhood. Once the genie is out of the bottle it's very difficult to put it back and I'm pretty sure, that these young kids, will find some way of circumventing the bans. 

Free speech in Britain is also under threat with around 30 people a day being arrested by the thought police for comments they've made on social media. Some have been imprisoned. 

In Liberal Victorian England, there was no such thing as a drugs policy or a Firearms Act that restricted gun ownership and the age restrictions on the sale of alcohol, was raised from 14 to 18-years-old, in 1923, after a campaign by Lady Astor. British governments of that period generally thought that many of these matters should left to individual choice. If you wanted to drink and smoke yourself to death, that was your business. Likewise, you were also free to starve to death. 

The Puritans have been called the teachers of the English middle-classes and that's why a lot of British working-class people rather despise the middle-classes or make fun of them. The English aristocrat Lord Randolph Churchill, doesn't seem to have been keen on them either. He once said that he thought that the English aristocracy and the English working-class had two things in common - a love of blood sports and a liking for sexual depravity.