It is instructive that the unrelenting puritanical clamour for a clamp down on binge drinking comes as overall consumption is falling.
Perhaps they’re in such a rush so that they can get their plans in place, then laud them a success on the back of the existing trend.
It’s happened before, where speed-cameras were installed where there had been a lot of accidents the previous year, and their efficacy ‘demonstrated’ by showing a reduction in accidents that is merely a regression to mean.
Post puritan, ergo propter puritan.
Alcohol consumption in 2009 saw the sharpest year-on-year decline since 1948, figures from the British Beer and Pub Association suggest.
The BBPA said the data showed a 6% decline in 2009
Well… 6% is nothing to be sniffed at, but it’s probably just a bli… oh.
the fourth annual decline in five years.
The association said UK drinkers were now consuming 13% less alcohol than in 2004, below the EU average.
So can anyone tell me what the ‘crack-down’ and the minimum pricing is all about?
Other than control, miserablism and peck-snifferous repression, that is.
Fuck ‘em all.
AJ
Al Jahom's Final Word 
Please clarify. This ‘Crack Down’ is this a normal traditional British ‘Blunkett’ style crackdown like he repeatedly had on immigration? Where he harrumphs a lot in the media appeases the right of his party but in reality does either feck all or the complete opposite? And we only have to look out the window in London to see how massively successful he was…
Or is the kind of crackdown involving Charles Bronson some machine guns and a damn good film?
Death Wish 99 – Chas books into the bide a wee retirement home………those were the days.
Nah, it’s the kind of crackdown designed to put more taxpayers’ money in the Treasury coffers – just like Gordon Brown helped everyone to quit smoking by doubling the price of fags in 1998! ;-)
Not so long ago – within my own brief living memory, in fact – domestic politics consisted of more than a daily succession of bans, crackdowns and intrusions into the lifestyles of the populace. Much more: it was a broad, sweeping landscape, with innumerable and contrasting policy areas part of the general national discourse.
So why the narrowing of the whole thing to a pitiful and heavily overpopulated square yard?
The EU. Purely and simply. Our domestic political classes have offshored 95% of their responsibilities, and so literally have 95% less to do with their time. In order to maintain an impression of dynamism and indispensability (we couldn’t possibly just dispense with them and their gold-plated fucking pensions, no no) they charge around their remaining square yard like hyperactive arseholes, wasting everybody’s time and money over unneeded and unwanted micro-management “initiatives” that serve only to reduce the wealth and happiness of the nation. On and on it goes, downward and inexorably downward, for they have nowhere else to go. And all the while they act as if nothing has happened; as if the pathetic charade they subject us to is how it has always been.
THE FUCKING CUNTS.
Hear some bansturbatory prat on the radio this morning going on about the savings to the NHS. What utter bollocks. Firstly the so called unit 9 grams of alcohol, was plucked out of the air and has no scientific basis (the American unit is virtually twice that of the UK).
Minimum pricing I reckon is illegal in the EU. Also it is effectively a collective punishment which I’m sure is illegal. I’m sick and tired of bloody politicians and their cheer leaders telling people what to do, denying choice and treating adults like they are all stupidly irresponsible.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the other factors in our perfect storm (if by ‘perfect’ we read ‘soul-crushing’ and by ‘storm’ we read ‘descent into a police state’):
1. Entire industries of rent-seeking, otherwise-unemployable control freaks whose financial wellbeing depends on the non-stop invention and promulgation of bullshit scare stories, and the step-by-step eradication of all forms of non-approved behaviour;
2. A critical mass of people whose livelihoods depend directly on the state in one form or another;
3. A state broadcaster that propagandises its paying customers 24/7 with the message ‘state intervention into your personal life is necessary and good’;
4. A critical mass of apathetic dullards who wouldn’t recognise a historical parallel if it punched them in the fucking face.
The nightmare will never end until a) we finally collectively snap and butcher the entire public sector, or b) the whole shoddy edifice collapses under its own unsustainable weight.
… but, don’t you see? The threat of a 90p per micromillimeter of ethanol caused this.
Just think what would happen if it was actually implemented!!!
(
[1] Booze cruises would become popular again.
[2] the price of bread would go up. Because of the devil yeast process, and not the price of grain.
)
HTH ;)