Salvation From Drink!

Whether you want it or not.

We don’t need to the government to dream up new ways to suppress our freedom to make choices and take away our liberty. Oh, no. Non-governmental alliances will do it for them.

Take the Health Alcohol Alliance, who are using some very spurious evidence and logic to try to make our money grabbing Prime Minister shaft us even further.

"The Health Alcohol Alliance says 13 children are admitted to hospital every day as a result of Britain's growing alcohol misuse."

Now, I’m fairly fucking sure that children drinking alcohol is a criminal offence. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but all that needs to happen here is for the existing law to be correctly implemented. No need for more taxes, no need for more rules or regulations. The laws are in place. Let’s use them.

"It wants TV adverts for alcohol banned before 9pm and stronger health warnings to be placed on promotional material."

What is a ban before the watershed going to achieve? Save kids from seeing evil advertisements for booze? Well, that’s a waste of time then, isn’t it? Because, as has already been noted, children can’t drink. It is illegal. You could make every ad in the breaks for kids TV about booze, and it wouldn’t matter. The law is very clear. It is illegal for children to drink.

And what would health warnings on alcohol adverts achieve? For as long as I can remember cigarette ads have had warnings that basically say "If you smoke you are fucked" on them, but it hasn’t made people stop smoking, and it hasn’t stopped people from starting to smoke.

"It calls for the government to adopt a twin strategy of increasing tax and reducing the easy availability of alcohol."

Increasing tax simply means people end up paying more and the government has more money to cunt away on pointless schemes. And what do we mean by reducing the easy availability of alcohol? Putting it on higher shelves in supermarkets? Presenting a series of Krypton Factor style challenges before people can buy a four pack of Stella? Making it a specialist shop purchase, like a wank mag in a porn shop? No matter, no doubt the Alliance will have some sort of idea that will make it terribly inconvenient for anyone who fancies a beer or a bottle of wine after work.

"The Alliance says increasing tax by 10% could cut all alcohol-related deaths by between 10% and 30%."

Or it could make fuck all difference other than making drinkers pay more for their poison. Or it could turn half the population into dancing bears – because we don’t know what the outcome of a 10% tax rise would be. Other than really pissing me off.

However to increase tax based on a projected possible outcome from a biased alliance strikes me as a frankly shitty way to make policy, to be totally honest with you.

"The charity Alcohol Concern said the price of all alcohol in shops has barely changed since the mid-1990s - with some wines and lagers becoming cheaper."

Good, quite frankly. For once consumers ain’t being fucking shafted by prices rises. This should be a cause for celebration, not for mealy mouthed carping from bastards like the Alcohol Concern.

"The number of alcohol-related deaths has more than doubled from 4,144 in 1991 to 8,386 in 2005. There has also been a substantial increase in the number of people suffering serious disease, such as the permanent scarring of the liver known as cirrhosis."

As with all stats, some context would be nice. What constitutes an alcohol related death? Did the classification change in the 14 year period? How has the increase in population affect the figures? Had the ability to detect cirrhosis improved over the period in question?

But anyway. 8,386 deaths in a population of over 60,000,000 doesn’t strike me as a major problem, however awful it might be for those affected. And certainly doesn’t strike me as a valid reason to start punishing the whole population with more taxes.

"The government has recently beefed up its Home Office target for reducing harm from alcohol."

The government reliance on targets rather than action may be a good thing here. But why is the Home Office dealing with harm from alcohol? Surely this should be a health issue? Unless the government sees drinking – something people do in their private lives – as a legal issue. What an interesting Freudian slip. What you do in your private life, even if it is enjoying more than one glass of wine, is not a health concern. The Home Office want to know. And the Home Office will be watching you…

"It has also introduced a cross-departmental Alcohol Strategy."

*Yawns.*

Cross-departmental strategy. Which roughly translates as "we don’t have the first fucking clue about what to do about this so the whole government will talk about it." Hopefully, in this case, inconclusively.

"This includes a public information campaign to promote sensible drinking, an independent review of alcohol pricing and promotion, toughened enforcement of underage sales by retailers and plans to introduce more help for people who want to drink less."

Campaigns, reviews, being tough, plans. Any drinker in this country should be quite happy that our government seems quite incapable of doing anything other than talking about possibly doing something in the future.

Except…

The Health Alcohol Alliance are calling for more government taxation. And you don’t need to encourage the shower of cunts who run this country to tax more. They do so just as easily as they breathe.

Furthermore, if people chose to drink, then fuck it. It is their choice. They are adults (and I can’t stress enough – it is illegal for kids to drink). They make a choice. It is a patronising, insulting and pointlessly paternalistic attitude from the Health Alcohol Alliance that allows them to think that they know best – better than you – about how you should live your life. It wouldn’t surprise me if the government jumps at the chance to implement some of what the Alliance wants, because their mindsets seem to be equally arrogant.

I do wish the arrogant shitheads who make up the Health Alcohol Alliance would go and drown themselves. Preferably in a vat of alcohol.