Nickie Aiken MP

THE government has been told to include the use of shisha pipes in its tough plans to stub out smoking.

Conservative MPs clashed among themselves as legislation aimed at stopping future generations from taking up the health-harming habit passed its first hurdle at the House of Commons last week.

The division did not prevent a majority vote in favour of prime minister Rishi Sunak’s idea to make it illegal to buy tobacco products if you are born after a cut-off date of 2009.

Three hundred and eighty-three MPs supported the proposal to 67 voting against, alongside a raft of abstentions.

The plan would mean that the legal smoking age would rise by a year annually.

But Two Cities MP Nickie Aiken, who is stepping down at the next general election, said the laws should not just be attached to cigarettes.

She told the Commons that it was “very important” to consider children being attracted to smoking but said: “It is not just about cigarettes. Shisha smoking, in particular in Westminster, Marylebone and Edgware Road in my constituency, has become very fashionable for young people.”

Asking health secretary Victoria Atkins to include the pipes in the bill, she said: “An hour of smoking shisha equates to 100 to 200 cigarettes within an hour.”

Ms Atkins said: “There are, in fact, five times more people in England today smoking non-cigarette tobacco, which includes cigars and shisha, than there were a decade ago.

“Worryingly, the greatest increase is in young adults. That is why we have said that tobacco in all its forms is a harmful product, and that we therefore wish to ensure we are consistent in the policy and the messaging that this is about helping young people to stop the start.”

Shisha is tobacco, sometimes mixed with molasses, smoked through a water pipe, often known as a hookah.

The pipe heats up the tobacco and some cafés offer different flavours such as apple, mint and strawberry.

It originates from the Middle East and Asian countries but has become popular in some areas of London.

The British Heart Foundation has warned that the practice can lead to the same diseases found with cigarette smoking.

Ms Atkins said that the bill is “intended to help children and young people to end their addiction to nicotine, which we know is one of the most addictive substances,” and added: “We should not assume that decreases in smoking rates such as those we have seen are inevitable. We also know that tobacco is being consumed in ways that are different from the ways in which it was consumed, say, 20 years ago.”

Among the dissenters on the government’s own ranks, Alexander Stafford, the Conservative MP for Rother Valley, said the proposal was “puritanical”.

“Why shouldn’t someone celebrate the birth of a child with a cigar, or maybe with a pinch of snuff?,” he said.

“I have many vices. I like a glass of beer or a pint of wine every now and again.

“I know in my heart of hearts that they are wrong for me and probably limit my health, but I drink them.

“I eat burgers and chips, accepting that they are fundamentally life-shortening. But do they make my life better?
Do I enjoy doing it? Yes, and I do so in the full knowledge of what I am doing.”

He added: “This is the crux of the matter: we are talking now about cigarettes, cigars, snuff or shisha, but what is to stop us from saying tomorrow or the next day that burgers, red wine and all the little things that people sometimes enjoy in moderation – that make life worth living – are bad for them?

“Sometimes people want that bit of enjoyment, but we sit here and say, ‘No, you cannot have that choice; we know better and we are taking that choice away from you’.”