Fixing our Brokenshire society

When a politician writes on a political party’s official blog, you expect the post to be a politician’s response.  That is, nannying and interfering, illiberal and illogical.  James Brokenshire’s post on the Conservative Party’s Blue Blog on the subject of alcohol regulations is all the above, with sprinkling of dishonesty and lies for good measure.

Labour’s policies on alcohol have been reckless and irresponsible. They were cavalier in introducing 24-hour drinking without thinking it through – and the consequences have been more drink-fuelled violence in the early hours, with A&E Departments forced to pick up the pieces.

Of course they’ve been reckless and irresponsible.  Government generally is irresponsible (car keys and booze, anyone?).  And, in this case, there IS more drink-fuelled violence in the early hours.  What a surprise, given that people can now drink in the early hours for the first time in over 90 years!  But, as Frederic Bastiat would be keen to point out, you haven’t taken into account that which is not seen.

Indeed, Chief Inspector Adrian Studd of ACPO said (ignore the rest of the spun diatribe), “The actual levels of crime and disorder remain the same, but across the piste, crime and disorder has decreased earlier in the evening but increased in the early hours. People still keep getting drunk.”

So crime is not higher at all - and that’s the police talking!  Huh, who’d have thought that giving people control over their own lives wouldn’t make things worse?

Rather than creating a café culture, we’ve now got a drink-fuelled crime culture.

Government’s job is not creating a culture of one sort or another - because not everyone has the same tastes, or ‘culture’.  Some people, let’s call them ’students’, like to drink a lot, and have very little to do the next day to stop them having fun at 3am.  Some people, let’s call them ‘ignorant morons’ don’t like or understand the choices that other people make.  So, instead of saying “I don’t like drinking at 3am, because, as an MP, I have to be at work at 7am the next day”, they say, “People that are different!  Die!  Kill!  Burn!”

How about you find out about things before opening your trap or walking through the division lobbies?  Just an idea.

But the social and health costs linked to binge drinking mean that we just can’t ignore the pricing and promotion of alcohol.  Drink being sold as a ‘loss leader’ at prices virtually cheaper than water isn’t right and it isn’t responsible.  That’s why we would legislate to ban below-costs sales and target alcohol duty on those products most closely linked to binge boozing.

“Cheaper than water”?!  Last night, I walked into the Tesco opposite Brokenshire’s workplace, and bought a 2-litre bottle of spring water for 36p.  If I’d got two bottles of Smirnoff for less than that, I’d have been laughing.  Sadly not.  I think this is one of those ‘price of milk’ times.  Politicians haven’t got a bloody clue - mainly because, at the parliamentary bars that we subsidise to the tune of £5.5m a year - alcohol probably is cheaper than water.  Damn those alcoholic binge-drinking MP!

The market mechanism is a wonderful one, because it’s already made your intervention completely pointless.  If supermarkets sell alcohol as loss-leaders, they lose money.  That’s not something those heartless capitalist bastards particularly want to do, so avoid it wherever possible.  But maybe, just maybe, they need to sell it below cost not for nefarious plans to corrupt our youth, but because of tax.  The government has already taken its cut of 70% of the total price, so politicians have hardly got grounds for complaining about the price that consumers pay.

But we’ve also got to challenge attitudes on excessive alcohol consumption. We would encourage locally-based programmes which combine education with enforcement, prevention with punishment.

“Punishment” of “excessive alcohol consumption”.  Finally reached the nub, huh?  What does ‘excessive’ mean?  I assume it simply means ‘What a politician would not choose to drink’.  Back to the politicians’ thought process.

‘They make different choices to me’ => ‘Their choices are wrong for me, and I was educated at Oxford’ => ‘Their choices must be wrong for everyone’ => ‘We must stop the poor non-Oxford educated people from making those choices’ => ‘Die!  Kill!  Burn!’

You don’t need a degree in PPE to know where the logical fallacies are in that.  Drinkers are already being punished by exhorbitant taxes on alcohol, and you want to punish them even more and even more explicitly.  We already have laws that prevent people fighting in the streets.  We have laws that prevent people from vandalising property.  We have laws against all forms of harm to other people.

We don’t need laws to prevent people from making perfectly reasonable lifestyle choices that don’t have an impact upon other people.  Licensing limitations are such that they assume two things: that everyone that drinks in the early hours will consequently harm someone else, and that such an act cannot be prevented by the police.  The first is a ridiculous statement that belies an attempt to moralise when they completely failure to understand other people’s mindset.  The second is a rank admission of the failure of the government to perform its most basic functions.

When that’s the case, why should we allow them to moralise to us?