Jeremy Clarkson has taken aim at the government’s proposed smoking ban, labelling it a ‘Stalinist decree’.
This week Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer confirmed Labour was looking to extend the indoor smoking ban brought in under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to try and ease the pressure on the NHS.
If the ban was passed, it could mean that people could be stopped from smoking in places such as pub gardens, include restaurant and cafe terraces, children’s parks, and shisha bars.
Smokers would also be barred from lighting up outside nightclubs, sports stadiums and universities – however it would still be allowed in open spaces like parks and streets.
The proposal has been met with much criticism, with Former ‘minister of common sense’ Ester McVey went so far to compare it to the Holocaust.
Now, Clarkson’s Farm star Jeremy, 64, has also slammed the potential ban.
Writing in his column for The Sun, Jeremy asserted common sense should simply be applied by smokers rather than banning them from lighting up in certain areas.
‘In my mind, that’s how a society should work. Assume that the vast majority of people are intelligent and compassionate and let them get on with it,’ he wrote.
‘Sadly, however, Sir Starmer does not think like this. He doesn’t like smoking so he’s going to ban it. And then, to make this Stalinist decree sound reasonable, he says the illnesses smoking cause cost the NHS a huge amount of money every year.
‘Really? Because the last time I looked, the tax on cigarettes raised £10billion for the exchequer every year. Without that coming in, the £22billion “black hole” Starmer keeps droning on about will become £32billion.’
Jeremy went on to call the Prime Minister ‘deluded’ and a ‘full-on Communist’, criticising other policies and state ownership before adding: ‘He believes that private enterprise in all its forms is bad and that the state should run everything.’
He then wrote that if the state ran WH Smith, ‘the newspapers would never arrive in a morning’ and that if it ran Greggs, ‘the bread would be mouldy’.
‘So, the idea that they could clean up the rivers if they were in charge, or supply cheap reliable power, is laughable,’ he continued, before saying he wanted to ‘get all this off my chest now because Starmer will one day label criticism as a hate crime’.
Concluding his column, Jeremy said he was going to update signage outside his new pub, The Farmer’s Dog, to warn customers they might not be able to smoke there at all soon.
This week Jeremy posted a photo of a sign at his newly opened pub in the Cotswolds, which read: ‘You like smoking. Others might not. If you smoke, please be considerate.’
He captioned it: ‘The olden days.’
Speaking earlier this week, the PM said the government ‘had to take action’ to reduce the burden on the NHS and taxpayers when it came to ‘preventable cause of deaths’.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said they would not comment on leaks but added: ‘Smoking claims 80,000 lives a year, puts huge pressure on our NHS, and costs taxpayers billions.
‘We are determined to protect children and non-smokers from the harms of second-hand smoking.
‘We’re considering a range of measures to finally make Britain smoke-free.’
Clarkson’s Farm is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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