Thirsty work
After the knives and paedophiles of previous summers, this year’s sun-stroked moral panic is shaping up to be cheap alcohol.
Booze turns people into arseholes apparently. Let me say something. I’ve been drinking for the best part of twenty years. I love to drink, I love being drunk and - this is unintentional, shamefaced machismo, by the way - I drink like some people breathe. In all those years of being drunk, I never hit anybody; never slapped the missus or the kids. I never stabbed anyone, robbed anyone or raped anyone, intimidated anyone on the bus home or harassed women. Nor has anyone in my social circle or they wouldn’t be there.
If you ask me, it’s not alcohol (cheap or otherwise) that makes someone an arsehole. It’s being an arsehole that makes them an arsehole. Let’s address the societal factors that cause arseholism, shall we?
But no, they want to raise the drinking age and put up the price of cheap alcohol. That’s collective punishment, isn’t it? Creeping prohibition. The idea that you can price somebody out of drinking is ridiculous anyway. They’ll just look for cheaper ways to get pissed until they’re drinking god knows what.
It’s the same with cigarettes. I gave up smoking not because it was bankrupting me (although it slowly was) but because I read some truly terrifying articles about lung cancer and its survival rates in this country and decided I really didn’t fancy it.
Now all I need is to read in stark terms about what all this cheap Stella Artois is doing to me. I’ve looked, I really have, but nobody seems to want to talk me out of my bibulous lifestyle. Putting seven pence on a can really isn’t going to put me off. Or anybody else, I would have thought, other than the pocket money crowd who, if regulations were enforced, wouldn’t be drinking anyway.
(And if life in this country was less shitty, particularly for those trapped on the work-bed-work-weekend-pissed-work-bed-work treadmill, fewer people would feel the need to be arseholed at every opportunity.)
Update: As ever, John Band is the voice of reason.
Posted on August 15th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
I suspect you mean “arseholes”, not “arseholed” in that last sentence. Freudian slip?
I actually did mean arseholed, with not everybody working for the the ratrace being arseholes, but I suppose it works either way.
How about raising the minimum age at which you could join the police to 30?
No, actually I retract that. I’d never refer to someone working for the ratrace as an arsehole unless, you know, they were demonstrably an arsehole.
legalise cannabis, all the kids would be smoking spliffs instead of drinking, and even arseholes can’t be bothered to fight after a big bifta
Sorry sim-o, but haven’t you been reading your Daily Mail? After two toots on the fatty boombatty, all the kids go on a crazy apeshit schizo rampage. There’s only one solution - straitjackets and intravenous Blue Peter.
Need a drink quickly.
Raising prices on things via taxes does stop some people from buying it. Not you maybe, because you’ve decided 7p a can is worth it. For others, it won’t be. I’m afraid it’s not ridiculous to try to price people out of drinking. Not that I’m saying it’s the right thing to do, but if you put up the price of something, less people buy it. Basic economics.
Well, I’d be interested to know how elastic demand is for alcohol, for starters, if we’re going to get into the economics of it. Demand for products consumed habitually tends not to be vastly affected by price increases.
With raising the price of alcohol, you’d have to raise the price across the board surely, or else people will just move on to cheaper substitutes. It’s why winos drink Special Brew and not Moet.