It's not just the banks. Today marks the next stage in the campaign to nationalise our bodies. Not content with those big written warnings on packets - Smoking Kills/Causes Impotence/Destabilises the Financial System, etc - the authorities are replacing them from today with stark pictures of what smoking can do: a tar-blackened lung, a cancerous throat, rotten teeth, open-heart surgery and even a corpse.

Notwithstanding the other image of a “flaccid” cigarette, these pictures are really horror porn for prigs, who can get excited about how dirty smokers are. What effect they will have on Britain's beleaguered smokers remains to be seen. Being shown shocking pictures of black lungs at school 40 years ago did not stop many of us taking up the filthy-but-delicious habit in our teens. As an ex-heavyweight champion smoker (Player's No 6 division) who gave up long ago, I know that smoking is bad for you. And so, by now, does everybody else. Yet the lifestyle police cannot accept that any thinking individual could simply choose to ignore their lectures and carry on smoking. “Let's show them pictures - they must be too thick to read!”

There are bigger issues here than discoloured teeth. In his essay On Liberty, J.S.Mill took a stand not only for freedom of thought and speech, but also for “liberty of tastes and pursuits...of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow [ie, if you smoke don't sue tobacco companies] without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong”.

As their campaign around rotten organs makes clear, the anti-smokers' real aim is to get you to cleanse yourself by changing what they think is your foolish, perverse and wrong behaviour, regardless of any harm it may or may not do to others. They have banned smoking in public places; they are pushing to ban it in private homes. Ultimately they want to ban it in your body and soul.

Mill championed individuality over uniformity as “one of the leading essentials of well-being”. Today's uniformity is captured by the identical personal quotes about the new campaign put out by national and local health officials. The priests of the new conformism are singing from the same hymn sheet, and their public health information campaigns sound like exercises in abuse of the public. They apparently believe that personal freedom has turned us into disgustingly obese, drunken ignoramuses, riddled with self-inflicted sexually transmitted and smoking-related diseases. I ask you, is that a healthy attitude?

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