Binge drinking: bottling it again
I never understood the thinking behind attempting to price people out of drinking. For example, Chancellor Alistair Darling in his recent budget put four pence on a pint of beer.
Now, a lot of people seem to be upset about this but I wonder how many of them stand at the bar thinking, ‘Hmmmm, it’s £2.54 for a pint now instead of £2.50. You know, I think I’ll leave it and get an early night’.
This morning, the Daily Mail are reporting that the government are looking to impose a minimum price on alcohol in supermarkets in another attempt to beat binge drinking.
Will it work? I’d argue the committed drinker will either downshift to a cheaper grog, brew his own or spend less money on other things to make sure he still gets his beer.
If the government were really serious about tackling problem drinking why aren’t they investigating the underlying causes of why a large section of the population look to getting shitfaced at every opportunity?
Probably because that would require an admission that life in general in Britain isn’t as rosey as painted in the nationalistic propaganda we still like to revel in. Some people get drunk because they like to. Some people get drunk because they feel they have to.
Gordon Brown is never going to stand in front of a camera and admit to an underlying misery, hopelessness and disenfranchisement that makes us reach for a drink. That would take some bottle.
Posted on April 5th, 2008 at 8:48 am
| See also • Thirsty work • Youth drinking and Occam’s razor • Grandstanding |
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Yeah, but for many people it’s not so much the misery of their lives that leads them to drink to excess, it’s that they like it, it’s available and they can afford it.
That doesn’t mean that I agree with making it expensive to Scandinavian levels, or that a certain amount of heavy drinking is linked to human misery, but I don’t think it’s the major cause by any manner of means.
ejh’s last blog post..Spain
I’m not sure. There seems to be an awful lot of ‘no wonder they’re the underclass, it’s because they’re smashed all the time’ around at the minute. It’s the reverse that’s true, surely?
Shit telly, shit job and shit prospects make the Friday night piss-up a holy grail for a lot of people. doesn’t it?
There was no thinking by glove muppet Darling or the muppet master. It was simply how to screw more cash out of the electorate by foisting the ire of drinkers onto the brewers. My fave pint went up by 10p not 4p and it is now £2.90 per pint in my fave country pub. This is friggging excessive. I only go there for social reasons really, not to pickle my neurocortex in alcohol.
With all the money these complete bastards are raking in from booze, petrol, VAT, stamp duty, inheritance, capital gains, industrial profits etc you would think they might ease the tax burden on individuals. Oh no, they just scrap the 10p tax band for incomes and screw the poor. Nice one McBroon, you utter callous bastard!
They will get a kicking in May. sadly, they will hang on untill the bitter end of 2010, gerrymandering constituences and handing out citizenship to riff raff in a bid to cling to power. It will not happen. And if Scotland goes SNP and leaves the union Labour will be totally finished. Now that would induce me to pay tax to open a bottle of Champagne.
“My fave pint went up by 10p not 4p and it is now £2.90 per pint in my fave country pub.”
Well, that’s not the tax then, is it? It’s the bloke who runs your fave country pub deciding that he wants to extort another sixpence off you…
john b’s last blog post..Wesley Snipes, etc
To be fair, this week’s Big Issue has an article on Special Brew - 59p for 500ml (less than the same amount of Coke), and upwards of 7.5% a can. Which is a tad mad.
But having said that, I entirely agree with anyone and everyone who says that upping the price of booze won’t make a significant difference. It’s one of life’s necessities, after all…
Nosemonkey’s last blog post..links for 2008-04-04
[...] at Chicken Yoghurt reckons Gordon Brown is driving everyone to [...]
With all the money these complete bastards are raking in
It’s not actually going to them, of course.
handing out citizenship to riff raff
Explain?
ejh’s last blog post..Spain
Yes, I can only echo that. They’re not allowed to keep this money, you know. They spend it other stuff like hospitals and schools, or so I’m told.
And yes, who are this riff raff you speak of?
The money may not all be going to the politicians (although too much of it does, if you ask me) but plenty of it is frittered away in the public sector without the necessary reforms to ensure that it is well spent. What’s more, the people who work in our schools, hospitals, police forces etc. are being insulted with below-inflation pay rises. Inflation averaged 4.3% last year, Gordon.
No, they’d rather spend our money designing new logos for their policy forums, then hastily redesigning them when it is pointed out that they look like swastikas.
Meanwhile, one of the country’s major horse races, sponsored by a brewery, has been won by Comply or Die.
Philip’s last blog post..Black Watch
CY,
Sure, 4p doesn’t sound like a lot. However, you must remember that that is a tax at source. Once you put add in the pub’s profit margin, VAT and the like, you are talking about considerably more than 4p.
On a Sky News clip, one publican pointed out that, in fact, he has raised the price of a pint of Carlsberg by 28p. That does start to make a difference. And you must remember that that will happen for at least each of the next two years. By which time, you could be looking at an extra pound on a pint.
In the meantime, the supermarkets – which is where the really cheap booze is – are trying to force the breweries to swallow the tax rise, and they’ll probably do it too.
And it won’t have the right effect: as you point out, booze pricing has considerable elasticity. This won’t stop binge drinkers and it will punish everyone else.
DK
Devil’s Kitchen’s last blog post..LPUK pubbing it large
Two drinks for the wife and me has gone from £4.50 to £5.00 in one month thats a lot but it crosses a barrier and that makes me angry.
It is a fairly basic economic principle that if you make something more expensive, less of it will be consumed. Think of it in macro terms (overall, this will mean some people consume less) rather than in micro terms (4p one a single pint doesn’t make that much difference to me, therefore overall it won’t make any difference to everyone).
Now, beyond the basic equation, the question becomes whether this will just make people buy the cheaper stuff, or whether the stuff is important enough to make people shift their spending rather than cut consumption. I am no economist, so actually don’t have a clue what the answer is to that.
Well, I do know that when I was at that that young age where binge-drinking seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do (the fact that I don’t do it now has nothing to do with the fact that it would probably kill me, honest gov), one thing was perfectly clear. The cost of getting drunk of an evening was an essential purchase, and whatever money I had left was an added bonus.
That was a long time ago, but I seriously doubt things have changed much.
Jherad’s last blog post..As the Dalai Lama wills it?
It is a fairly basic economic principle that if you make something more expensive, less of it will be consumed.
While that’s true Katherine, it’s unlikely to be “problem drinkers” (whoever they may be) who consume less. Instead it’ll be the people who have a couple of pints and don’t see booze as an essential part of their life who will cut their consumption. As a strategy to fight problem drinking, it has little chance of succeeding. As a strategy to reduce overall alcohol consumption, it may well work.
Jim Bliss’s last blog post..Hey Boy, Hey Boy
Two drinks for the wife and me has gone from £4.50 to £5.00 in one month thats a lot but it crosses a barrier and that makes me angry
Me, I remember the first place I actually had to pay for that a pound for a pint. (The Globe, Baker Street, late in 1986. It’s not that surprising that it was about the same price when I bought a pint in Redcar more than a dozen years later….)
ejh’s last blog post..Spain
Sorry, that was incoherent. More than a pound for a pint, was meant.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for complaints about taxes. It’s very easy to complain about them and it’s very easy to proclaim that money is being wasted that could be saved if only the right reforms were made. If it was that easy, somebody would have done it long ago.
In truth, the more complex society becomes, the more spending is required to keep it going, and for that reason (and despite the fantasies of the teenage libertarians) the state needs to raise a great deal of revenue. Now as it happens, individual tax rates have been cut quite a lot over the past thirty years - not that it stops the well-off whining about their lot - and therefore indirect taxes tend to need to rise to make up for the shortfall. It’s easy to complain about this, as I say, but then again it’s easy to run the country from a position in the saloon bar. Albeit a little more expensive than it was, ho ho.
ejh’s last blog post..Spain