Should we devolve intolerance? There is no clear health justification for the Welsh government’s decision to ban e-cigarettes from public places, offices, factories, pubs and lorries. The decision has been widely criticised by Cancer Research UK, Action on Smoking and Health and numerous anti-smoking organisations. They regard e-cigarettes, overwhelmingly used by smokers trying to break the habit, as the most effective means of doing so.

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The Welsh government replies that it wants to “send a message” to children and “create the conditions which enable people to live healthy lives.” For good measure it also wants a register to control tobacco retailers, a ban on smoking in non-enclosed public spaces, an offence of “handing over” e-cigarettes to children and curbs on tattoo parlours and body piercers. It is no surprise that this drastic extension of the nanny state is supported by Wales’s army of health civil servants.

What next? Anyone wandering through central Cardiff after 10 o’clock at night will get a shock. It is not smoking that should concern Wales’s government but drinking and obesity. E-cigarettes are motes in the eye compared to these beams. Yet the devolved government “allows” rampant drunkenness on its streets and rampant abuse of children with fatty foods. When is it going to take on the lobbies that defend those health-devastating poisons?

Studies under way by Public Health England and at UCL suggest that e-cigarettes could have “vast public health benefits”, proving 60% more effective in cutting addiction than other methods. The Welsh government rejects all this on the grounds that “any possibility” that children attracted to e-cigarettes “might be more likely” to take up smoking was good enough to justify a ban. On that basis alcohol consumption in front of children should unquestionably be banned.

In these battles, the obligation on government is to weigh evidence, not capitulate to the zest of bureaucracies everywhere to control (rather than educate) the private or semi-private behaviour of its citizens. Whether or not the ban will make it harder for Welsh smokers to kick the habit remains for research – not ministers – to show. What Wales has done is set a poor example of irrational policy-making, and of devolution as a champion of personal freedom.