Britain will follow Australia into a crime storm with the Tobacco and Vapes bill
This opening line, from the Sydney Morning Herald last month, is the kind of thing you might expect in a story about the cocaine trade, but it was a tonne of illegal tobacco stored in a warehouse that the gang was after.
Australia has become a cautionary tale of what not to do with tobacco and vapes. It has the highest cigarette taxes in the world and has banned vapes completely. It has always banned the sale of nicotine vapes, but that didn't work so they banned the importation of nicotine vapes. That didn't work either so they banned all vapes and made nicotine vapes available on prescription only. Again, it hasn't worked. For every vape sold on prescription, 1700 are sold on the black market.
The most visible sign of failure is the firebombing of tobacconists and vape shops that has become a regular feature of the evening news, especially around Melbourne. There have been more than 230 arson attacks and a string of public shootings in the last two years as gangs fight for market share in the 'tobacco turf wars'.
Could it happen here? There is no reason why not. Illicit vapes and counterfeit cigarettes are being sold more or less openly on high streets up and down the country. We have the second highest cigarette taxes in Europe (after Ireland) and the government is on the cusp of introducing the Tobacco and Vapes Bill which will ban a growing number of adults from buying tobacco products from 1 January 2027. Even the Australians haven't been daft enough to dabble with this form of prohibition.
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill will also allow the government to restrict the flavours of legal vapes, thereby giving the black market a lucrative new niche. Not content with banning disposable vapes last month, the government is going to double the cost of using refillable e-cigarettes by imposing a tax of £2.20 (plus VAT) per bottle next year.
If you wanted to make a bad situation worse, you could hardly design a better set of policies than this. Sales of legal cigarettes nearly halved between 2021 and 2024 despite the number of smokers only falling by 5 per cent. It is obvious that the illicit market picked up the slack and yet HMRC claims that only one in ten cigarettes smoked in Britain is illegal. Reassured by such Panglossian factoids, virtue-signalling politicians have given the Tobacco and Vapes Bill minimal scrutiny and are patting themselves on the back for creating a 'smoke-free Britain'. It is a fantasy bordering on madness.
They have picked the worst time to be complacent. The police are too busy to play whack-a-mole with Britain's countless illicit tobacco retailers. A £2 billion drop in tobacco duty revenue has already been added to Rachel Reeves' black hole. For the time being, the violence associated with Britain's booming black market tobacco trade is less visible than Australia's but it will only take a bit more prodding from guileless politicians for it to come out of the shadows.
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