As I commented back before the election, there is to be a great repeal act – and jolly good, too. Goodbye to the repressive surveillance database state and the spying on ordinary citizens by a suspicious mistrusting political elite.
On the other hand…
For, in their latest Coalition Programme for Government [PDF], the ConDems have decided that one of their very first acts will be yet more controls on alcohol.
Oh, for crying out loud… They just don’t get it, do they? Binge drinking is not new. Problem drinkers are not a recent manifestation. Problem drinkers will drink to excess no matter what is done with pricing – they will make savings elsewhere and put their money into the booze, much as my grandfather did in the thirties. Indeed, my grandmother had to meet him coming home from work on payday to get the housekeeping before it was spent in the pub. Binge drinking, new? Pull the other one.
And, as Timmy points out there are other consequences of such ill-conceived legislation.
I’m absolutely certain that they’ve not thought this through.
So, booze wholesaler goes bust (or offie, pub, supermarket, village shop, whatever).
The liquidator comes in and has to shift the stock swiftly in order to get cash back for creditors before rents and storage costs eat any further into the pittance they’re going to get.
How do you shift stock quickly? You discount it of course.
This is now illegal.
Think that’s too extreme?
Yes, frankly, I do. It is idiotic. I have been inclined to sit back and see how this new coalition pans out before wading in with too much criticism, not least because much of what they have been saying is right – particularly on civil liberties – but this plan is straight out of the New Labour book of fuckwittery.
It is interesting to note Tesco offering up its support, like those grouse who stretch their wings with the coming of the warmth of August on the gentle moors. Naturally, they see profit for themselves so that’s all okay then.
Tesco says polling for the company found excessive drinking and the anti-social behaviour it causes is one of the public’s most serious concerns.
Well, if those people polled really thought that, they won’t buy low priced alcohol, will they? And they would willingly buy higher priced alcohol from Tesco on the grounds that they were doing the decent thing, wouldn’t they?
Hypocrisy has a foul stench about it, as does ignorance and control freakery.
Yep, and all this because of the terrifying statistic that, according to the ONS, alcohol consumption has been falling for the last 6 years.
And it might fall again next year, but it will have nothing to do with nonsense such as minimum alcohol pricing.
By the way, doesn’t it remind one of when Boris was elected and the first thing he did was ban beer on the tube? Sheesh.
.-= My last blog ..Common Sense Of The Week =-.
How much of this ‘binge drinking epidemic’ is real, and how much is simply figures plucked out of thin air? Like the ‘5 portions a day’ and ‘permissible units per day’.
Oh, for crying out loud… They just don’t get it, do they?
On the contrary, I suspect that they get it very well and the idea is not to actually solve our problems but to maximize distributed misery.
.-= My last blog ..Stop Press – Mutley the Dog =-.
Oh, nothing’s going to stop the puritan surge, least of all a change of “government”. See, I’ve said this in various places; it was all jolly fun hating NuLabour, but the politicians don’t decide policy any more. THey never have, really. It’s decided by the greater class around them, and these days that is the entrenched campaigners, the mediacrats, the NGOs and charidees and so on. All the government does is enact what it’s told to enact. Even the smoking ban, the government were bounced into that. A couple of years before they’d told ASH there was no way they’d do it. Then they were forced into it.
The Proggie Network decides the policy. They’re very good at what they do. Since the collapse of Marxism, they’ve all gone back to their roots as Victorian evangelists, and we’re now in Victorian Values Part II.
We have a whole belief system to destroy, the belief system that rules the ruling class. We have a big job ahead of us and things are going to get a fuck of a lot worse before they get better; and my own general suspicion is that they won’t get better until we can engineer our own Fervent Generation- like the youngsters of the ’60s, but cleaving to liberty instead of leftism. I think that can be done, but not next week.
I’m waiting to see what the ‘great repeal bill’ ends up including and what happens with it.
I was sceptical when it was first mooted, sceptical when Longrider suggested voting Conservative because of its mention in their manifesto and am still sceptical that it is anything more than a public relations stunt designed to divert our attention away from the rest of the cock-ups and bollocks they will manage over the next few years.
But the first week in and planning a ‘ban’ on low price alcohol doesn’t look good does it?
Well so far, it looks like we will see the back of ID cards and the NIR, Contact point, a winding back of the DNA database and the vetting of people working with children. it’s a start and 100% improvement on New Labour. They could go a lot further and I’ll be the first to criticise if they don’t.
Had I been living in Bristol I would have voted Tory – as it turns out, my erstwhile labour MP lost his seat to the Tories. I expect he saw it coming as all our local councillors went the same way a couple of years back.
No, it doesn’t and I make my views on the matter clear in the above.
It may ‘look like’ a lot of good things – but I think I’ll remain sceptical untill something actually happens! 😉
A few principles that I think will be borne out by the next 18 month’s experience. No civil liberties enhancing measure that has a net cost will be implemented. Thus ID Cards will go because of the huge cost and headache of the programme. Removing the innocent from the DNA Criminal Database will not happen because it will take a fair amount of money to erase the 800,000 profiles of innocent persons on the database.
The net result of tighter controls on alcohol sales will be more ID checking. At present it is quite difficult to get a drink if you look under 30 and don’t carry around your passport or driving licence. It will be ironic in the extreme if the Coalition repeal ID Cards but make it necessary for a large proportion of our population to carry ID into to get a drink.
The Great Repeal Bill is better than nothing, but at this point, it isn’t looking that great. The proposed controls on alcohol look like more of what we’ve been used to under Labour, as does the threat/promise to give tax-payers’ money to the big political parties. And to be honest, the noises that the Conservatives and LibDems have been making over the past 13 years have not exactly been encouraging.
I expect that the coalition will be better than what went before, but there will not be much in it. And I think IanB has put his finger on the heart of the problem: “We have a whole belief system to destroy, the belief system that rules the ruling class.”
.-= My last blog ..Nick Clegg, Freedom, the State, and the Great Repeal Act (1) =-.