Current top story (at the time of writing) on the BBC is that the charity Alcohol Concern has said that parents who give their kids alcohol in the home should be prosecuted.
I sometimes think that I'm living in a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers where almost everyone else in the country has been replaced by a low-grade moron who just wants to sleepwalk into the police state (or indeed the police station). "Yes, I'll come quietly officer... it's a fair cop guv... I plead guilty to not treating my kids like toddlers and trying to explain to them what responsible drinking is."
A Mr Don Shenker from Alcohol Concern was made to look stupid on the BBC Breakfast News when he appeared alongside a rep from the British Beer and Pubs Association to argue the case. Even the anodyne BBC interviewer managed to destroy Shenker's arguments. There is no evidence showing a link between the incidence of children drinking with parents in the home and going on to binge drinking later in life. There is a statistical link between alcohol abuse as a kid and alcohol abuse later. But how many parents are binge drinking with their kids? Not many, I suspect.
And (as the beer and pub guy pointed out) without CCTV in every home and an army of snoops to police it (which I'm sure John Reid would love) there would be no way of enforcing Alcohol Concern's proposal anyway. Really, if they're that worried about the dangers of alcohol, why don't they go the whole hog and argue that it should be banned - that we should introduce Prohibition? I'm sure John Reid would like that too. He could argue for massively increased police and homeland security expenditure on the grounds that illegal bootleggers were funding terrorism. It's a 'win-win', as the policymakers like to say. So watch out for that one in the next Labour (or Tory) manifesto.
At times like this one longs for the honest, no-nonsense professional drinker; Oliver Reed, Peter Cook, George Best. Those guys' lifestyles had a drawback, which is that they're now dead. But there's no way they'd have gone for bullshit like the Alcohol Concern proposals. And I also think it's quite unlikely that their liking for alcohol was caused by their parents giving them a glass of wine with their dinner.
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Alcohol Concern's proposal betrays an astonishing lack of comprehension - it's as if they've never spoken to anyone who has consumed alcohol, or have ever stepped outside their homes.
The greatest single problem that this country has with alcohol is the giggling-teenager mentality with which it is regarded. There is nothing guaranteed to up the mystique of alcohol more with kids than more forcefully prohibiting it - indeed one might sensibly argue that a more measured, less frantic introduction of alcohol into the diet, as is so common elsewhere in Europe, might result in fewer kids necking as much as they can get away with as soon as they can pass for eighteen.
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