Nigel Farage, the populist British politician and ally of Donald Trump, recently lit up outside a pub in London. This was not in itself unusual. He has regularly been photographed with a cigarette in hand, often also with a pint of beer—part of a “man of the people” shtick that he has honed over the years, belying his private education and previous career as a commodities trader. This time, though, Farage was staging a political protest of sorts. Smokers, he told reporters, could be considered the “heroes of the nation in terms of the amount of taxation they pay.”
Farage was speaking after The Sun, a popular right-wing tabloid, reported that the United Kingdom’s new Labour government is planning to expand a law that since 2007 has banned smoking in indoor public places in England to cover pub gardens and other outdoor settings as well. The policy’s details are still in flux, but Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has not…