h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The issue of a British booze culture seems never to be far away. Today a committee of MPs have made pronouncements about cheap alcohol fuelling drunkeness and violent behaviour. As ever, the call is "something must be done".

But can anything be done without understanding the root causes? In the 8th Century St Boniface wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury:
"In your diocese the vice of drunkenness is too frequent. This an evil particular to the pagans and to our race, for neither the Franks, nor the Gauls, nor the Lombards, nor the Romans, nor the Greeks commit it."

A lot of blame is directed at the price of alcohol, which has fallen in real terms over the last ten years. Recently, supermarkets were selling cans of lager cheaper than bottled water. But is it too simplistic to advocate raising taxes? Is it even possible given EU free trade commitments? In 2000, Tescos were importing Famous Grouse whisky from Portugal and selling it cheaper than they could if they bought it direct from UK suppliers. This led directly to Duty being frozen to level the playing field. In the context of the EU, unless a Europe-wide raising of duty is initiated, there is little the Govt can do.

So what's the answer? Is there an answer? Is there actually a problem or is this just a favourite hobby-horse of the media?

One answer is to give young people something else to focus on. Youth clubs etc which give people more fulfilling pastimes than standng on street corners or just going down the pub.

This will take some money and time to do but I have said for ages that cancelling the Olympics and building youth clubs all around the country would help a great deal in reducing the problems of un-focussed kids just dossing about.

It's not 'just' the fault of the kids.

I agree wholeheartedly with that, but is that the age-group causing the "problem"? Much of the drink-related crime and violence is committed by over-18s. They're classed as responsible adults.

Or is your point to catch them young and stop them getting into the drink scene?

>cancelling the Olympics<

In your dreams 3dots - we hardened Romantics are actually excited and proud of London 2012. (And yes I know you're hardly ennamoured with the idea..)



I reckon they should take booze adverts off the telly for a first step. It seems incredible to me they are still on the box, if fags are banned. Though it would be a shame when one thinks of all the great ads down the years for it like the Guiness ones and Cinzano Bianco

Elfish Gurgling Twit<...is your point to catch them young and stop them getting into the drink scene?>

Yes, spot on. Like alot of the social issues there's not much you can do with the current adults, although if you watched Jamies Ministry of Food it doesn't take much to make peole realise their own talents and abilities.

Effers<

>cancelling the Olympics<

In your dreams 3dots - we hardened Romantics are actually excited and proud of London 2012. (And yes I know you're hardly ennamoured with the idea.. )>

WOW, finally one person I 'know' who wants the Olympics. Though the youth club idea will have a longer legacy.

There are plenty of youth clubs. People just aren't intrested in them anymore that is why many of them are shutting down.

I can't see that taxes are the answer. It's the countries with cheaper alcohol that don't have a problem. Although I'm not sure what the answer would be? Sharia Law ?

Higher taxes will probably just mean more people drinking own brand Vodka or White Lightning.

make alcohol even easier to get

cafe mcds etc

bring down the duty so there is no need for happy hours

stop the culture of get smashed in ...time

and bring in a culture of mellowly tipsy 24/7

I'd say try to get people away from cheap booze in supermarkets and back into pubs, where you at least have some control.

Promote beers and lagers over shots.

People aren't going to stop drinking, but if you have to buy it by the pint rather than by the six pack, and by the pint rather than by the 35ml shot it's going to cut down on your speed.

The real question though, is why do people feel that they have to drink hard in order to have a good time? I don't know the answer. I like to drink, and drink hard on occasion, but not to the extremes that I watched some of my peers reach.

The problem is a cultural one, raising the price of booze generally is just collective punishment and collective punishment is never either a fair or a good idea.

A couple of solutions might be:

*More effective policing of city centres and stronger sentencing for alcohol-related crime

*Tax on high (>5%abv) beers and lagers; tax break on low-alcohol (<4%abv) of the same: this may encourage people to drink weaker boozes.

I *think* there's already a tax-by-percentage system in place, so that would be easier to make work. That gets my vote!

I touched on the tax issue earlier. The problem is if we have a tax regime substantively higher than that on the continent, retailers simply buy their stocks there and bring it back in.

The "drink until you're smashed" culture is a strange one though. I certainly drank a lot when I was younger, but the objective was to get "merry". Indeed, the mark of a man was how well he could hold his drink. Now I frequently hear young people saying the objective is to get absolutely rat-arsed as quickly as possible. I must be missing something because I fail to see the fun in that.

Isn't there also an issue of getting used to alcohol because of some drinks where you don't really notice it?

Some drinks look (and taste a bit) like fruit juice despite having not little alcohol, say about 5% (like Breezer). These you can drink a lot without actually noticing anything until it's too late. At least when you drink proper alcohol you know you what you are drinking.

My drink of choice used to be Smirnoff Ice, before I grew into (thankfully). I did, however, know that my personal limit was three. Yes, it tasted like lemonade, but it still hit you and I figured out very quickly how far I could go.

People drink these partly because they don't like the taste of other things, but also so they can neck them quickly to get drunk as fast as possible. And that's the bit that we don't understand.


Just one thing though- people always said that raising the taxes on fuel wouldn't stop people driving. I did notice that when the oil prices started to skyrocket people did actually drop their petrol consumption.
On the other side, however, how many people do you know who stop smoking because of the cost, rather than the health or social implications?

Raising taxes further isn't going to help much, but lowering them on low-alcohol drinks might. More of a carrot, rather than stick approach.

Apologies for the slightly garbled content of this post.

I have noticed that not a few of my get-drunk-as-often-as-possible contemporaries dislike the taste of actual alcohol. My housemates a few years ago were drinking cider adulterated with quantities of blackcurrant squash to conceal the cider taste.
I feel this is somewhat backwards. Whjy drink if you don't like it?

Well that's just it- they are drinking it for the intoxicating effect alone.

I really can't see any justification for raising the tax on beer and other drinks any higher... True there might be some BoB-awful lagers at cheapo pence per bottle in the big supermarkets, which makes look like alcohol is cheaper, but when I'm now freuqnetly spending £3.20 plus for a pint in a local pub, compaired to £1.70 7 or 8 years ago, it doesn't really look like its cheapo
There is already a record number of pubs going out of bisunes (certainly round here in Cambridgeshire anyhow, form what I read a while back in the Campaign for real ale magazine)
There is another side-effect of raising the price that the government would do well to consider, which is the more xpensive you make alcohol the more in particular kids will just buy drugs instead. I'll regularly spend £30 or £40 or more on a night out, just on beer and maybe a few spirits, as it stands I could spend the same amount of money and get myself enough illegal drugs to have me happily wasted for a good couple of nights rahter than just the one.
For example of inflatory pressures on booze versus illecit drugs; £15 worth of cannibis gets you the same quantitiy (quite possibly stronger though), as it did fifteen years ago. fifteen years aogo I was spending not much more than £1 or £1.50 on a pint of beer...
There does seem to be a trend with the government of not understanding how people work and think; if you give people all the information E.G., regarding the detrimental effects of smoking, or of drinking alcohol, and they then* chose to still drink/smoke, then there isn't really anythign the government can do...short of banning it, which itself doesn't work...

They should stop selling alcohol in supermarkets - put it back in off-licenses.

They should make it an offence if found incapable due to alcohol if you're below the age of 18.

They should cut out the hypocrisy about wine - it's alcohol, people are just as dead if you hit them after a bottle if Chablis as they are after 3 bottles of Special Brew.

I can't really see someone who drinks Chablis going out and decking someone!

You don't see middle class people standing on street corners passing round a bottle of Premier Cru.

You do see them sipping it, sitting at at pavement tables with their lobster and oysters, outside swanky restaurants in Covent Garden and Soho. And they do like to guffaw....but its true I haven't yet seen one deck one another.