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Leisure, Politics, and Consumption of Tobacco
smokers quitting, the government decided against them because of cost, but also
because they smacked too much of the nanny state. 60
It seems logical that if government or state activity is said to be a product of a
particular culture or experience of leisure, then that activity should impact only
on certain sections of the population. Arguably, this has been the case in the history
of smoking and health. Appeals to smokers in the early years of anti-smoking
propaganda reflected the social and economic background of policy workers
themselves and which therefore resonated most clearly with those bourgeoisliberal
smokers who had always stressed the importance of independent and
individual assessments of the smoking habit. That this has been the case is
evidenced in the figures for smoking rates among different social classes. Whereas
in 1945 smoking rates had been similar across different income groups, by 1994
it was found that among unskilled and manual workers, 42 percent of men and 35
percent of women smoked, but that these figures were as low as 15 percent of men
and 13 percent of women of the professional classes. 61 Just as bourgeois smokers
had the time and cultural capital to read about and cultivate their smoking habit in
the nineteenth century, so too did their late-twentieth-century counterparts have
the time and intellectual resources to weigh up the medical evidence against
smoking. In recent decades, health campaigners have taken a more proactive line
against the tobacco industry. In 1984 the British Medical Association labeled the
smoker as victim rather than rational individual, and policy workers have stressed
the importance of the differences in experience of the smoker, depending on
region, age, gender, class, and ethnicity. 62 That it took until the 1980s to radically
shift anti-smoking agendas attests to the strength and pervasive influence of a
particular culture of smoking formulated in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
In concluding, I do not wish to deny the importance of taxation and revenue,
industrial lobbying and advertising, physical addiction and dependency in the
history of smoking and health. But the purpose of this chapter has been to demonstrate
how a particular culture of leisure was translated into a set of political beliefs
about the role of the state in individual consumption decisions. In an increasingly
affluent society, this should, of course, be of no great surprise. Jean Baudrillard
has argued that just as workers developed a politicized labor consciousness from
their experience of the relations of production, so too will consumers develop a
political consciousness out of their experience of the affluent society, in which
leisure and consumption play an increasingly prominent role in our lives. 63 This
has undoubtedly been the case: the consumer movements of the developed world
have been perhaps one of the most significant social and political developments
since the 1950s. As early as 1960, Michael Young warned that in Britain the
Labour Party could well find itself under threat from a Consumer Party if it
continued to reflect only the interests of workers and trade unionists. 64 Our
experience of leisure has continued to shape our political development. In general,
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