Monday, June 16, 2008 

Man the barricades.

Has there ever been a more ridiculous, ill-thought through, completely unworkable policy based entirely upon gesture politics than Scotland's apparent banning of the sale of alcohol in supermarkets and off-licences to those under-21?

Oh wait, there's 42 days.

Related:
Stumbling and Mumbling - Managerialism and the law
Rowenna Davis - There is no cure for underage drinking

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6/16/2008 11:39:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, May 05, 2008 

Scum-watch: Women! Know your limits!

Man your moral panic stations! Some women in drinking nearly as much as some men shock! In a follow-up to the no shit Sherlock freedom of information request by Channel 4 News that revealed that, horror of horrors, more women are being arrested for being drunk and disorderly, the Sun has taken to the streets of major cities and found that, incredibly, there are women in them and that they seem to have imbibed intoxicating liquor. See and suffer:

A YOUNG woman vomits in the gutter in an ugly but momentary pause during a boozy night out.

On another street, in a different city, another woman who is too drunk to stand is helped into an ambulance.

She doesn’t know where she is, but she could be in any town in Binge Britain as the “fairer” sex go out to play.


You have to hand it to Martin Phillips, the apparent aggregator of this lowest form of "journalism": he's not even bothered to hide the hectoring, misogynistic tone beneath a veneer of faux concern. Women? Not at home? Drinking alcohol? Not knowing their limits? This cannot be allowed to pass muster!

Nearby, Gemma, 18, has lost her taxi fare and is trying to get some cash.

She does herself no favours as she tells passers-by: “If you give me a fiver I’ll show you my t*ts.”


Now, if the Sun really cared about Gemma's situation, it would have given her the money, said don't descend to that level, and left it at that. Instead it's a wonderful crystallisation of everything wrong with Binge Britain.

Wait, it gets even more pathetic:

GLASGOW

Reveller Lauren McNiven and ten of her mates have hit the town to celebrate a friend’s birthday.

They started drinking at 7pm and usually stay out until 3.30am, she says.

Student Lauren, 21, who is about to qualify as a primary school teacher, adds that they never get into trouble but she admits she will have up to 11 glasses of wine or spirits on a night out.

At around midnight, barefoot teenagers in colourful dresses lurch from bar to nightclub along Sauchiehall Street and Queen Street, narrowly avoiding shards of glass strewn along the pavement.

Police flood into the area to head off trouble before it starts.


The Sun goes in search of drunk women in Glasgow, and it still didn't manage to find any! The best it can manage is someone who drinks a fair amount and a group of girls who avoid glass on the deck. Still, got to make up the word count somehow, haven't you?

And so it continues. Young women throwing up, flashing, with the Sun taking advantage of the situation by taking photographs of at least one such example. If there was some sort of comment in the article on exactly why so many spend their weekends getting out of their heads, there might just be some sort of justification for such puerile voyeurism; that however might result in some truths hitting too close to home for the Sun to take, having to consider that maybe our capitalist, consumerist society isn't the paradise that the newspaper makes it out to be.

There is of course also a hypocrisy here which is an inch thick: the newspaper which so worships the female form and the freedoms which go with it, yet which is repulsed when those self-same young women they endlessly feature then dare to exercise their freedom in a different way. Or indeed, how it adores publishing the photographs of celebrities falling out of clubs and the opportunity that presents for taking those special shots, the ones up their dresses, but which is disgusted when normal young people are seen doing the same thing. The showbiz pages also run a "Caner's League", and one of first acts of new Bizarre editor Gordon Smart was to celebrate Cheryl Cole's "liver punishment" while admiring her "bangers". That though is all so very different from others taking it too far. We could of course also remember an embarrassing incident involving the Sun's own editor when she had too much to drink, but that would be descending to their level. Still, it's nothing a night in the cells doesn't fix, right?

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5/05/2008 09:21:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, March 07, 2008 

A very Tory tax policy.

Yes, it's old, but it illustrates the point well.

The moral panic over binge drinking is firmly in swing. You know the whole thing is reaching a height when such potentially disingenuous information as there were nearly 100 children under 8 admitted to hospital for "alcohol-related problems" is being used as evidence that the whole thing is out of control; that those children seem most likely to have broken into alcohol cabinets or got hand of booze somehow with the parents panicking once they've realised what they've done is the most likely explanation is apparently too obvious of one to be considered.

Moral panics usually develop something like this. A problem, which might well be a genuine problem is identified; the media jumps on it, exaggerates it out of all reasonable proportion, usually starting campaigns to rid the country of this filth, as in the video nasties case, or currently by making clear that something must be done, either by raising the price or clamping down hard on the alcohol fuelled "yobs"; the politicians then either legislate, or it dies a natural death. The former usually happens far more often the latter.

Up until now, the political parties have eschewed the simplistic demands that tax on booze be raised so that it simply becomes unavailable or out of reach for those "most at risk", knowing quite well that there would likely be a significant backlash against them rather than the more "nannying" commentators calling for it. Although Labour under Blair was most susceptible to jumping on bandwagons regardless of the consequences, so far David Cameron hasn't managed to see one he hasn't fancied riding on either. Hence the proposals from George Osborne for raising the taxes on the drinks apparently most favoured by the yobboes who ruin the fun for everyone else.

The proposal is about as politically bankrupt as they come. While few are going to object to the likes of Special Brew and Tennents Super, drunk chiefly by tramps and alcoholics being more heavily taxed, it simply shows all the signs of not being thought through, especially the idea that duty could then as a result be reduced on "lower-strength" beers and wines. Has the idea not occurred to the Tories that this will mean the person drinking to get drunk as quickly as possible will simply switch their consumption to the now cheaper but still fairly strong lagers, resulting in them actually not being out of pocket at all? Indeed, if the taxes, the putative rise on a can of super-strength lager being around 38 pence, are meant to be prohibitive and for sales to drop, won't that actually result in less tax coming into the exchequer and therefore the slashing of duty on other alcohol costing even more from the public purse? It also wilfully ignores the fact that simply raising the price won't stop an addict from consuming when they have to; it will simply mean even more money being spent which can't be afforded.

Taxing "alcopops" more heavily is also similarly without merit. How many times does it have to be pointed out to politicians that teenagers drinking to get drunk don't buy them, both because they're already expensive, small in size and also because despite the supposed image they're meant to have, drinking booze where you can't taste the alcohol means that you aren't a man, something that the average teenager, beset by peer pressure, will avoid at all costs? The whole thing is already turning passe; the mentioning of Bacardi Breezers, which went out of fashion a good few years ago, shows it up for being out of touch. They'll be denouncing Hooch next. Those affected will instead be those who enjoy them reasonably responsibly, and who aren't especially keen on Wifebeater and its variants, which will be unaffected. Osborne was also explicit in saying that they're targeted mainly at young women, who correct me if I'm wrong, but mostly don't cause the trouble that binge drinking is associated with. It's the hectoring sort of tone that almost comes across as sexist, as though women shouldn't be drinking such awful sweet liquids at all. That Osborne is rumoured to have been a prolific user of substances that are illegal rather than legal and cause far more harm and damage across the globe than alcohol also certainly doesn't make him anything approaching a hypocrite.

Whether the Tories would actually implement such a policy if elected is beside the point. It's a cheap gimmick, meant to influence the government into acting, and knowing this one they'll be more than happy to steal it or come up with one even more draconian. The press has reacted; now it's up to the government. Then the next passing craze will come along.

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3/07/2008 11:37:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, February 23, 2008 

Say no to 24 hour thinking!

24-hour drinking fuels rise in crime, sighs the Telegraph. Nowhere in the article is the obvious pointed out: that because the change in the law has meant that the pubs/clubs now don't chuck out all at the same time, i.e. 11pm or 2am, it means that the police have been much better able to deal with offences that would have previously overwhelmed them.

As an actual police officer wrote on the Mailwatch blog:

The licensing act (24 hour) has also helped a great deal. Instead of kicking-out time for everywhere at 11pm, we’ve got slow dispersement into the night, so the police haven’t got a great mass of people all at once. Crime has ’shot up’ after the licensing Act because we CAN detect, arrest and deal with more people, rather than be swamped and therefore unable to arrest/detect any crime at all! This ‘crime-spike’ was intended by the Home Office and the police as a result of the above reason, but you won’t read that in the Daily Mail!

Nor in the Telegraph.

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2/23/2008 08:55:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, February 19, 2008 

Scum-watch: Any evidence will do.

One of the rules of production Nick Davies outlines in Flat Earth News is to go with the moral panic. The Sun isn't just going with the moral panic with teenage binge drinking, it's determined to lead it. Here's today's leader on the subject:

BRITAIN is in the grip of an underage booze culture.

Teenagers have cash to spend like never before.

And they’re blowing it on frightening quantities of alcohol — against the law.

The Sun’s expose of a typical night out in two major cities is a disturbing read.


Let's take a look at the Scum's "disturbing read" then. In Leeds the first call-out is to a 40-year-old woman suffering a fit after drinking; the second is to a 19-year-old where her friends fear her drink has been spiked; the third is to a 16-year-old having a fit after drinking, but the call is cancelled before they get there; the fourth is to a 17-year-old, who's been drinking, but has got into difficulties because of the differences of temperature in the club he was in and then the cold after he left; and the last is to a pregnant 22-year-old, who promptly vomits in the back of the ambulance.

In London, they only make one call, and that's to a man in his 30s who's tripped and hurt himself after drinking 5 pints.

As I'm sure you'll agree, the evidence that teenage binge drinking is out of control is truly overwhelming.

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2/19/2008 08:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, February 14, 2008 

Scum-watch: Newlove makes more demands, while Putin gets attacked.

I realise we've been a bit heavy on Scum-watches this week, but I can't help that they keep printing such utter tripe.

Today sees Helen Newlove given yet more room to list her shopping list of WHAT MUST CHANGE, this time on alcohol and access to it:

THE brave widow of murdered Garry Newlove last night demanded LIFE BANS for pub bosses who sell booze to children.

Widow Helen said: “Unless binge drinking goes unchecked, our town centres will turn into battlefields.

“Any bar manager or pub chain boss selling alcohol to minors – deliberately or not – should be banned from the industry for life.”


And what would this achieve exactly? There are already hefty fines in place for those who sell alcohol to anyone under 18, and more or less everywhere now demands ID if you look under 21. This only inflicts collective punishment on those who are old enough but who refuse to have to carry ID everywhere with them in case they decide to buy age restricted products. Common sense ought to be the order of the day, but Newlove seems impervious to that sort of logic. In any case, is it really the underaged that are turning "town centres ...into battlefields"? No, it's those old enough to drink being irresponsible. As ought to be pointed out, of the group that killed her husband, Swellings was old enough to buy alcohol, and presumably was the one who did.

Helen, 46, also wants:

LESS boozing on TV soaps because it makes heavy drinking seem “cool and normal” to teenagers.


Hear that TV producers and writers? Despite the fact that you're meant to be reflecting British life, and who knows, perhaps even generating debate about our culture and where we're heading, you've now got to censor your output because Mrs Newlove thinks it makes our rebellious youth decide it's cool. Now, far be it from me to suggest that they don't need television to think that drinking, getting drunk and all that entails in general is a bit of a hoot and that they'll do all of that regardless of what the ham actors are doing on EastEnders or Hollyoaks, but I think that Newlove really might be talking out of her arse.

COMMUNITY service for landlords if drink-fuelled violence starts outside their pub.

Right, so they'll be responsible if those they serve just happen to kick off outside. Sounds fair and proportionate.

STRICTER checks on ID at pubs, bars and clubs.

How many times does it have to be pointed out that the problems aren't happening because underage drinking is taking place in pubs etc? As Lee Griffin has pointed out, if anything the problem has been exacerbated because those who did used to drink in pubs have been shown the door due to the crackdowns. When once they would have behaved in the pub or been kicked out and barred, they now instead drink either at someone's house or out in the open, usually either with alcohol that has been bought by the parents themselves or by someone they've asked to get it for them. This is when the rowdiness and aggravation happens, not in pubs where if you behave like that you quickly get thrown out.

LAWS to stop companies from targeting kids with booze.

There are already such ones in place, and the Advertising Standards Authority's code explicitly bans anything that is seen as targeting children.

BANS on booze-filled sweet fizzy drinks such as alcopops.

This is yet another misnomer. The group that killed Newlove's husband had drank strong cider and lager, which is far cheaper than the so-called alcopops and therefore infinitely more attractive. Those who drink them tend to because they're not great fans of alcohol, not because they're intending to get drunk on them, as those Newlove wants to target do.

“Every time you turn on the TV you see a soap set in a bar or club. Coronation Street and EastEnders revolve around pubs. Hollyoaks constantly features boozing teenagers.

“The end result is that kids are totally acclimatised to alcohol. They can’t draw the line between TV and reality and so grow up thinking it’s cool and normal to get hammered.”


If you could distil nonsense down into a couple of paragraphs, I think you'd likely end up at the above.

Moving on to the Scum's leader:

ONCE again the murk of a suspected Moscow-approved assassination hangs over Britain.

Tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili, living here in exile from Georgia, dies mysteriously at his Surrey mansion hours after striding around London in the spring sunshine.

Mr P had the misfortune to be the enemy of another Mr P.

The sinister Vladimir Putin, President of Russia.

The dead tycoon had opponents at home, where he was suspected of plotting a coup.

But he also crossed Putin — who has huge influence in Georgia — by making billions from Russian oil.

Mr Patarkatsishvili told police he feared he would be killed.

He hired 120 minders — but it was no good.

Perhaps he did die of natural causes.

Perhaps Mr Putin is a lovely chap with all the charm of a country vicar.

Perhaps pigs might fly.


Putin might have huge influence in Georgia, but he and the government in that country don't see eye to eye.

Still, it doesn't hurt to slander Putin some, does it? I mean, especially seeing the results of the initial post-mortem:

An exiled Georgian billionaire who had spoken of assassination fears died of natural causes, according to initial post-mortem tests, Surrey police said.

A Surrey Police spokeswoman said there was "no indication that the sudden death of Badri Patarkatsishvili was from anything other than natural causes".

She said: "Extensive toxicology testing is yet to be carried out. This will take a number of weeks."

Oh.

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2/14/2008 10:05:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, August 15, 2007 

The kids aren't alright.

Death, outraged reaction, draconian solution suggested, draconian solution rejected/forgotten, cycle repeats. It's all too familiar, too rehearsed, too tedious. Add in the factor that it's the silly season and the whole thing is taken up another couple of notches, resulting in editorials claiming that every street is full to the brim with drunken teenagers while the police are handcuffed to their desks filling in paperwork. It's beyond silly and inaccurate, it's exacerbating the already out of control stereotype that the youth of today spend all their time drinking cheap strong booze while smashing up the local playground equipment, and it does absolutely nothing to even begin to sort out the existing problem that there actually is.

Peter Fahy's suggestions on what has to be done to tackle the "yob culture" and youth binge drinking are discriminatory, downright daft and completely wrongheaded. The tragic death of Garry Newlove, the inquiry into which Fahy is meant to be heading, which occurred when he tackled a group of teenagers alleged to have vandalised a small digger he had hired, has not been linked in any way to whether the group had been drinking or not, but that doesn't seem to have gotten in the way of Fahy's arguments on what must be done.

How raising the legal age to purchasing alcohol to 21 will help such avoidable and pointless deaths from happening is not explained, most likely because it will most likely only make the existing situation worse. Nearly all supermarkets and off-licences, which are currently erroneously getting it in the neck for selling to those who are underage, have almost all instituted schemes across the board which require staff to request ID from anyone who looks under 21 before selling them any age restricted product. This already means that those above the legal age but unfortunately don't look it are required to carry around ID lest they decided they'd like to buy a beer. The same is true in pubs and clubs; there may be the odd store which doesn't care, but the fines are now so heavy and strict that it isn't worth the risk. This points towards the fact the most alcohol is being bought by adults, either at the request of teenagers who congregate outside shops and ask them to buy it for them, or by their parents, who either don't care or have it stolen from under their noses. Raising the price of alcohol will also only do so much: it completely ignores why both children and adults are increasingly turning to mass booze binges, while penalising them for wanting to escape from their own humdrum lives for a few hours.

Banning public drinking might remove the odd clusters of youths that do in some places get together, drink and start getting rowdy and harassing people, but again it will only take the problem off the streets, making it more likely that the same will just occur either in private houses or in other places not considered "public". It takes it out of public sight without changing the practice itself. That's all well and good for the police, who aren't called out to deal with it, and for the residents of places where groups have previously suffered, but it just moves it on to somewhere else.

The lessons that the Unicef report on wellbeing ought to have taught have similarly been completely forgotten. It showed that the relationships that are vital in cultivating happiness are just not there - whether it's with their own peers, or with their "elders" themselves, who are by turns either disconnected from their children and young adults, or as the case seems to be with those outside of a family circle, completely uninterested or even hostile towards other children. This is down not to a broken society, as the Tories claim, but to an erosion of empathy, the cult of the self and the mantra of false individualism. When such relationships are missing or stilted, it's little surprise that the things that do bring people together - booze, drugs and sex - are all being increasingly abused by those younger and younger.

What's needed is a complete reapprasial of what it means to both be a child and a teenager in Britain today. Rather than it all being the fault of political correctness and a failure to intervene as the tabloids preach, we've become so scared of our children because of how beastly and violent they're meant to be that we've forgotten that they are us - just even more confused, apprehensive and frightened than we are. Cameron was mocked for suggesting that teenagers needed a lot more love, dubbed by the press and Labour as "hug a hoodie", but he more or less had it right. Despite all the obstacles, we need to both talk and listen. At the moment, the Victorian cliche of being seen and not heard is half right - we see them all too often, but we ignore them.

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8/15/2007 08:03:00 PM | | | links to this post

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