According to reports, David Cameron is calling for minimum alcohol price legislation. This will apparently claw in additional loot to the Treasury of £70 million, which is reason enough for the greedy scum to want to do it, but it's the pretence that this is to help us poor, miserable sinners, to protect us from ourselves in the face of a drinking epidemic that doesn't exist, that sticks in the craw.
Maybe it's just a plan to make the EU look good.
A Whitehall source told [the Telegraph]: "The Prime Minister has decided that when it comes to alcohol, something pretty radical now has to be done and he is keen on the minimum price.Be honest, you thieving fucker, you want more money, you want to dip your sticky fingers into the pockets and purses of the public. You can't possibly stack up a factually-based case that we're drinking more, because we aren't, whatever photos of comatose girls and pools of vomit the Daily Mail can provide.
Maybe it's just a plan to make the EU look good.
7 comments:
Well setting aside the fact that alcohol smuggling is now a profitable venture for many and this tax avoidance is now widespread, I am amused by the mis-use of the word "radical"
Now if the Whitehall source had said "The PM has decided to do something radical, so he will stop lecturing people and generally treating them like bovine clods, end the already-high taxes altogether because it's just stealing really and fuck-off out of their lives because there are more than enough laws to deal with any alcohol related dis-order as it is"
That would be radical.
But simply bandwagon jumping, hectoring people and coming up with a flimsy excuse for more control and tax-looting ~ radical this is not. More like par-for-the-course, lecture-and-loot statism.
If any government truly wanted to cut down on alcohol intake they'd put licensing of premises back into the hands of the police and they'd rescind the 24hr drinking laws introduced by Labour.
Blair may have had an idyllic holiday on white beaches lapped gently by the Mediterranean, but that doesn't mean his idea of a 24hr 'Cafe Society' translates to England. I'm assuming that he didn't holiday in Sol y Mar Square in Benalmadena!
I hope you had a good Christmas, TT. Here's to 2012 and long may you blog :)
Sigh. Anything they touch, anything at all, turns to ashes.
Thanks GV, best wishes to you too. I can't say I agree with bringing back the old licencing hours though.
@ Goodnight Vienna
It is no business of central government what time I close my pub , just as it no business what price I sell my beer at or whether people smoke in it.
The move to 24 hr licences in principle was right, provided suitable local arrangements were in place to ensure it was managed intelligently, however it would seem this didn't happen.
So far as I am aware it has been a condition of keeping a licence for many years that serving alcohol to people who are already insensibly drunk is not allowed.
As always, the laws already exist to deal with this so-called crisis (which isn't really) it is just it is far sexier to have a headline grabbing initiative.
Bastards.
I maybe wrong on this one, but I believe the concept of 10.30 closing for pubs was introduced in WW1. Apparently munitions factories were very dangerous so you had to pay top rates to get people to come in, so they had lots of cash. They tended to get pissed a lot and miss the next days shift thus reducing shell production (there was some big shell scandal in WW1 when the guns didn't have enough to fire or something), hence 10.30 closing.
I am confident the danger from the Kaiser has passed.
SaoT - I've heard that theory too so there's probably some truth in it - I suppose it would make sense. As always with governments, they never rescind emergency legislation once enacted.
Cuffleyburgers - You're right that there are laws already in place and we don't need new ones. The ones we have should either be struck out or re-written to close loopholes. Tbh I'd rather burn the lot and leave only Common Law. I agree that government is much too big and needs curtailing drastically, not by cutting 50 seats in the HoC and re-writing our Bill of Rights as is currently proposed. No doubt Cameron's policy will be hailed in the msm as 'ground-breaking', 'innovative' and, worst of all, 'returning power to the people'.
As you say, bastards, one and all.
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