Saving the nation's teenagers - through taxes!

Patricia Hewitt wants Brown to “really increase” the taxes on alcohol to stop teenage binge drinking. She says:

"We've got enormous numbers of young people, particularly on a Friday and Saturday night, ending up in the casualty department of hospitals because they're drunk. They've fallen over and bashed their heads in because they're drinking too much.”

It is too time consuming to list the fundamental flaws with Hewitt’s argument, which can be summed up with this phrase:

"I think putting taxes up on alcohol would help discourage young people from spending too much money on alcohol."

When you listen to unmitigated toss like this you have to wonder whether Hewitt herself was binge drinking last night and ended up falling over and "bashing" her head. As I said earlier, it would take too long to properly go through all the different reasons as to why Hewitt is spouting shite from her arse shaped mouth.

But I will make two points – firstly, raising taxes and putting hysterical warnings on cigarettes has not diminished the appetite for fags, particularly amongst teenagers, so fuck knows why Hewitt thinks that it will be different with booze. Perhaps it is the fact that she is a brain dead idiot. But the second, and more crucial point is the fact that surely drinking amongst most teenagers is illegal anyway? As some who has held a liquor licence in the past, I can categorically state that the law does not allow people under the age of 18 to be sold or to buy alcohol or drinks with alcohol in. So how about this – perhaps we could enforce the existing laws?

But that isn’t very NuLabour, is it? Why enforce and existing law when you can raise taxes instead? Ignore the law and try to up the funds going to Gordo and the rest of the spendthrift mongs in the Treasury. Maybe they can use the money gained from increased taxes on booze to fund their own election campaigns.

And they wonder why we fucking hate them…