George Killeen is a Research Associate at the Adam Smith Institute.
Liberty has long been at the heart of the British national character. The Magna Carta, central to our political mythos, was written after ordinary Englishmen joined forces to resist a tax hike imposed by an unelected monarch. The echo today is hard to miss.
Liberty is simply the water the English swim in. A quiet, pragmatic aversion to government overreach has persisted across generations. In Britain, we have long assumed that the state has no self-evident right to micro-manage personal choices.
From the Second Reform Act of 1867 onwards, the Conservatives positioned themselves as protectors of this individualist instinct. Lord Salisbury transferred administrative power from unelected magistrates to elected local councils. Decades later, Margaret Thatcher reduced the basic rate of income tax from 33 per cent to 25 per cent. David Cameron legalised same-sex marriage. As different as these measures were, each rested on the premise that individuals are better directors of their own lives than Whitehall officials.
Yet over its last fourteen years in government, the Conservative Party drifted steadily away from these instincts, succumbing to the quiet comforts of the nanny state.
Under Rishi Sunak, the party laid the groundwork for a generational smoking ban whose logic is absurd. If left unchecked, it will create a two-tier adulthood defined entirely by birth year: a forty-year-old may legally buy a packet of cigarettes, while a thirty-nine-year-old standing at the same counter is deemed too young for full autonomy.
It did not stop there. Time and again, Ministers yielded to the reflex that ‘something must be done’ – introducing sugar taxes, penalising hospitality, and creating the Online Safety Act. Rather than trusting adults to navigate their own lives.
Since their defeat in 2024, the Conservatives have had to reckon with what went wrong. While high taxes, political turmoil, and stagnant growth explained much of the verdict, the betrayal of basic civil liberties was just as damaging. The Tories should never have tried to dictate how people live.
Encouragingly, Kemi Badenoch appears to have recognised this. Since becoming leader, she has re-anchored the party in the classical liberal principles that underpin conservatism. Unfazed by political consensus, she opposes the generational smoking ban, criticises the expansion of sin taxes, and defends free speech as a birthright rather than a state concession.
A central test for any future right-of-centre administration will be dismantling the Online Safety Act 2023 – a heavy-handed measure with troubling side effects. Passed under the banner of child protection, the Act introduced a sweeping digital surveillance regime, requiring citizens to surrender government ID or biometric data to access unapproved websites.
Even on its own terms, the policy is flawed. Rather than making the internet safer, it has driven users toward avoidance. Proton VPN reported an 1,800 per cent surge in downloads from British users seeking to protect their privacy.
The same intrusion extends into everyday life. Walk into a supermarket and the presence of the state is immediately visible. Sweet treats are banned from checkout displays, and multi-buy offers like two-for-one are restricted to ‘’ items. Even as health innovations give individuals greater personal control, the government insists on eroding consumer choice rather than allowing market innovation to provide alternatives.
While reversing the smoking ban is essential, the party must also resist the current campaign against vaping. Heavy-handed regulations will simply push consumers back to cigarettes or into the illicit market. A UCL study found that 23.1 per cent of smokers bought illicit cigarettes in the last six months. Meanwhile, proposals to force cigars into ought to be rejected out of hand. One wonders what Winston Churchill would have made of state inspectors dictating the design of his cigar box.
Conservative MPs and members must recover their belief in a smaller state and the practical benefits it brings: privacy, responsibility, and independence. The Adam Smith Institute’s Rally for Liberty provides a timely forum to set out that vision. A genuinely free society rests on a simple idea: that adults should be allowed to make informed choices about their own lives without constant oversight from the state.