Stuff

Let's All Argue About Booze Britain

By Gavin Haynes

Yesterday, David Cameron announced that he was plotting to bring about the downfall of "Booze Britain" by putting a minimum price on every single unit of alcohol. The only figure that's been proposed thus far is 50p, which would mean that a can of something like Tennents Super, with four and a half units of alcohol in it, would set you back £2.25. Which is about double the current price, which means that you'd only be able to get half as drunk. Or just as drunk, but twice as poor.

Obviously booze is a contentious issue. Who has the right to dictate how much of it you have? I thought this was a free country? And why can't the guy whoever he is over there's been staring at you all night fucking SHUT UP talking to his idiot FRIENDS or I'm gonna smack them all in the fucking head with this pint glass?

Let's all have a media argument about booze!

WHO IS DAVID CA-MORON TO TELL ME WHAT TO DRINK? HE DOESN'T OWN MY BODY
by Johnny Walker

So Nanny State has wrapped her claws around yet another aspect of our lives. First, you couldn't birch your servants beyond 'reasonable force'. Then they outlawed arson. Now, you can't have a quick two-litre bottle of cooking whisky in the privacy of your own motorway underpass without some smarmy politician trying to stick their nose in to tell you that you're wrong and should be stopped.

Well it won't wash. Not this time. I know I said that when they banned smoking in pubs. I know I said that when they banned me from pubs. But this time Citizen Smith over here is going to stand up for his civil liberties and strike a blow for all our freedoms, or if not, perhaps try to source the type of turps that doesn't make you blind.

I am not entirely ignorant of the government's position. Certainly, there are people out there, and I've definitely spent some time in their company, for whom eight tins of Diamond White is one tin too many. I've seen them make a spectacle of themselves: falling over, harassing livestock, walking into a cake shop and eating all the icing off of the top of the cakes with a thumb, driving the wrong way down the M6. But these are the sorts of foibles we're all party to from time-to-time. After all, who amongst us can truly say that they haven't been held in cells overnight for exposing themselves to a party of French schoolchildren outside the Natural History Museum at a quarter to four in the afternoon?

The fact remains that this is a blanket proposal that takes no account of individual tolerances, and I can most certainly hold my drink. Bowel movements are another issue, naturally. But drink I can definitely hold. Indeed, as I was reminding my good lady wife the other night: “YOU FUCKING CUNT, YOU THINK YOU OWN ME, BUT I WILL DO WHAT THE HELL I LIKE.” And that, very much, is my message to our so-called elected representatives. And, unlike with my good lady wife, I do not feel that I will be curled up foetally in their laps some 20 minutes later, sobbing and rocking gently. Certainly not unless David Cameron also tells me that we've been through so much together, and he really still loves me and please stop hitting him.

Whatever their ambitions, our leaders must realise that this is a further tax on the poorest households. It doesn't matter to Cameron: he can probably afford Strongbow. But any such proposed sub-minimum would require the hard-up likes of me to earn another three or four pounds a day. It may seem a trifling amount, but in truth that is simply money that could be much better spent on four litres of Tesco Value Cider.

I just can't see why the government would spend their time trying to fust through miniscule reforms such as these, at a moment when there are much larger issues to deal with. A lack of university places. The deficit. CFC cans.

It is every Englishman's right to benefit from the free market liberalism inherent in our national character, and not to have these socialistic practices enforced upon us. If I honestly wanted to live in a country where alcohol cost whacking, great sums, I'd simply move to Norway. If I had a passport. And if I had 50 quid for the flight. And if I were still allowed on flights. You get what I'm saying, though.