Cut-price drink costs our country too much

13 April 2012

The leafy square in Stockwell on which I live has a particular seasonal music, which starts up in spring and goes on till autumn.

I don't mean the songs of robins and blackbirds: I mean the carousing of drunks, who collect in the square on warm evenings, and yell and sing and fight till the early hours of the morning, while sober citizens, too nervous to go out and say anything to them, lie awake cursing.

Sir Liam Donaldson, the Government's Chief Medical Officer, is braver than me and my neighbours, for he has decided to confront the nation's inebriates. He wants the Government to discourage drunkenness by setting a minimum price on a unit of alcohol.

Britain has a nasty relationship with alcohol. Although we're drinking far more than we used to, we still don't drink all that much compared to our neighbours. The French and Italians put away far more than we do, and many more of them die of cirrhosis as a result. But we have a higher rate of alcohol-related violence than any other rich country except Australia.

That's why Sir Liam is right to try to intervene. It's not because alcohol is a growing public-health issue. People are welcome to drink themselves to death for all I care — though I resent having to pay for their liver transplants while they're still reaching for their next Bacardi and Coke. The reason the Government needs to do something is that drunkenness is spoiling this country: it's the reeling louts who ruin the evenings in my square; the weirdo with the can of Stella who I saw on Friday, yelling "Effing nigger" at a passer-by; and, most of all, the murders of blameless people who happened to be in the wrong pub at the wrong time.

Sir Liam's idea of getting rid of cheap booze is a reasonable one. Plenty of studies show that price affects how much people drink; and because incomes have risen faster than taxes, alcohol is much more affordable than it was 20 years ago. By targeting cheap alcohol, rather than nice Burgundy, this scheme targets not those who like a tipple but those who drink to get drunk.

Unfortunately, Sir Liam's idea seems to have fallen victim to Gordon Brown's unpopularity. Now that the Prime Minister can count the people on whose votes he can rely on the fingers of one hand, he is understandably wary of alienating any new section of the electorate — even the dregs reeling around on the nation's streets. He has therefore come out against Sir Liam's scheme, saying that he did not want to impose unnecessary burdens on "moderate" drinkers.

Sir Liam's critics (the Prime Minister and the drinks companies) complain that his scheme would discriminate against the young and the poor: being generally shorter of funds, they would find drink harder to afford. They are correct, of course; but that's just too bad. Getting sozzled on cheap cider isn't a fundamental human right; freedom from drunken violence is.

Feverish night for us oldies

Robert Webb, who won Let's Dance for Comic Relief, looked lovely in his leotard, but his performance paled against the one that nice neighbours organised in my square on Friday night in aid of Comic Relief. Fifty or so of us strutted our stuff to Saturday Night Fever, pointing at the moon and swinging our ample hips for all we were worth. I'm not sure which was funnier: our attempts at synchronised dancing, or the disgust on the faces of the watching teenagers.

The Vatican tests my patience

I TRY to respect other people's beliefs but sometimes they make it difficult. The Catholic Church has excommunicated Brazilian doctors who aborted the twin foetuses of a nine-year-old girl who had been raped by her stepfather. The abortion was carried out to save her life.

I was encouraged to hear that there has been some dissent in the Vatican about the excommunication, but the extent of this, it turns out, is that one archbishop has questioned the urgency and publicity with which it was announced. Very liberal of him.

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