Drinking: the crackdown continues

According to this story in the Times, it is not just the alcoholic winos and stupid young wankers (so beloved of my A & E Charge Nurse commenter!) who are being targeted in the latest campaign.

Middle-class wine drinkers will be the focus of government plans to make drunkenness as socially unacceptable as smoking, The Times has learnt.

Under the plans published today, a fresh audit is to be conducted by the Government into the overall costs of alcohol abuse to society and the National Health Service.

“We want to target older drinkers, those that are maybe drinking one or two bottles of wine at home each evening,” a Whitehall source said. “They do not realise the damage they are doing to their health and that they risk developing liver disease. We are not talking here about the traditional wino.”

So, there you have it; the government is going to decide how much you drink and they are going to ensure that you drink no more than they say you should. Their justification is that you are costing the state money in healthcare. It matters not that it is your fucking money that the state has appropriated—nor that you pay extra in alcohol duty—because, to these statist fucks, that simply isn't the case; it is the state's money and what you are using to buy your wine of an evening is, in fact, the wee bit that they let you keep. And you are abusing the state's trust: do you see?

Part of Wikipedia's definition of fascism says this:

Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual and other societal interests subordinate to the needs of the state, and seeks to forge a type of national unity, usually based on ethnic, cultural, or racial attributes... the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism, authoritarianism, militarism, corporatism, collectivism, totalitarianism, anti-communism and opposition to economic and political liberalism.

Welcome to the political world of NuLabour, for is there a single one of those attributes that NuLabour does not share?

Today’s strategy, by the Home Office and the Department of Health, broadens the Government’s offensive against excessive drinking, with the focus moving beyond teenagers and the binge-drinkers to include those regularly sipping wine at home.

As part of the strategy, ministers wish to highlight the increasing burden that drink-related disease is placing on the NHS, which four years ago was estimated to be costing between £1.3 billion and £1.7 billion.

Does anyone have the figures for the tax collected from alcoholic drinks in the same year? Would anyone like to bet me that—like smoking—it is far in excess of the NHS costs? And court costs? And compensation costs?

UPDATE: thanks to Mark in the comments, who lists the drink duty revenues.

• Beer & cider duties: £3.2 bn


• Spirits duties: £2.3 bn


• Wine duties: £2.3bn

Surprisingly low really, but still adding up to a grand total of £7.8 billion (about £0.2 billion less than tobacco taxes).

We recognise that drinking causes damage so we tax the externalities of its bad effects: in fact, if, as I suspect, alcohol duty is more than all those costs above combined, we more than tax those externalities.

Ministers want drunkenness in public to be as socially unacceptable in ten years’ time as smoking or drink-driving is today.

The state wants to control your behaviour, ladies and gentlemen, and it no longer feels that it has to be subtle about it; could anything else be so indicvativeof NuLabour's arrogance and the confidence that it has in its control over the social mores of the British people?

Inevitably, though, there are those fuckers sticking their oar in who are even worse than the sodding government.

But the British Medical Association said yesterday that such measures did not go far enough, adding that customers in licensed premises needed better information to raise awareness of the dangers of excessive drinking and drink-driving.

Vivienne Nathanson, the head of science and ethics at the BMA, said: “It is not the nanny state. It is about informed choices. It is hard for the average person to work out how many units are in a drink these days. Glasses of wine are much larger than they used to be and many beers and wines are much stronger”.

Let me send a very clear message to the BMA: go fuck yourselves, you useless pieces of floating turd. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! I hope that every doctor in the land cancels their subscription and throw you fucks out of a job.

As for NuLabour: anyone who votes for them is voting for a fascist government. Seriously, I would rather—if you actually cannot bring yourselves to vote for Tory, LibDem or UKIP—that you voted for those left-wing cunts at the BNP: at least they will be so fucking useless that they won't even be able to open their letters of a morning...

What the fuck is wrong with this fucking country? If I can just get a wee bit more permanent web work over the next year or so—and things continue as they are—I am going seriously to consider emigrating; hey, Timmy, what's the weather like in the Algarve...?

UPDATE 2: Timmy imagines the future of wine consumption...

People simply cannot be alowed to choose their own path to perdition, that's entirely unacceptable. We'll have to ban wine cellars, as this allows people to have too much alcohol in the house. All wine racks will have to be replaced so that only one bottle in a 24 hour period can be used, corkscrews fitted with a timer so that again, only one use per 24 hours is possible.

It's just occured to me that this might, of course, be a cunning plan by our Nulabour masters to counteract the rise in population by encouraging thousands to emigrate. Either that or they are trying to appease the Muslims...

UPDATE 3: from The Telegraph, some stunning, breath-taking arrogance...

"We want to target the older drinkers, those that are maybe drinking one or two bottles of wine at home each evening. They do not realise the damage they are doing to their health and that they risk developing liver disease," a Whitehall source said.

Right; that'll be because you ar so much better educated and more knowledgeable than anyone else, is that right, you fucking wanker? Why don't you, Coaker and Flint all go and get fucked in the eyes by a priapic horse and leave the rest of us alone, you donkeycock-sucking, interfering, fascist bastards.

FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF!

UPDATE 4: Shuggy has a great post on this.

This is because they have no concept of the distinction between self-regarding actions and those that harm others. More specifically, this has something to do with the apparent view of this government that your liver is in someway public property.

You'll notice the typical NuLabour formulation: having failed to enforce the laws that already exist against anti-social drunken behaviour, the target becomes more ambitious and seeks to change our views. Bit late in my case - mine having been formed by a) excessive drinking b) reading JS Mill who said:

"No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty. Whenever, in short, there is a definite damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law."

But this does not apply if you are becoming quietly sozzled in your own home. Or, for that matter, if you get quietly sozzled in a pub and don't attack or abuse anyone on your way home.

I have got hammered more times than I can remember (indeed, I am notorious for it), and I have never physically attacked anyone, nor had the desire to. I haven't vomited or pissed in the street either.