Silly piggy

You don’t get to be a senior policeman without being stupid and authoritarian. As a result, it’s no surprise that Sussex chief constable Ken Jones wants to ban cheap drinks promotions.

There are points to be made on both sides about binge drinking. While the media hysteria about ‘town centres turning into battlegrounds’ is certainly nonsense, it’s probably not good for our livers or minds to be pissed up all the time (this, of course, is none of the police’s business. Their job is to keep order, and it’s unseemly at best for them to blame their inability to do so on the booze industry).

But whatever your position on grog-related disorder, the example Mr Jones cites of the kind of deal that should be banned – Threshers’ "£10 for three bottles of half-decent wine" offer – implies that he has absolutely no comprehension whatsoever of any aspect of British people’s relationship with alcohol.

The people who get drunk and lairy in the streets are not the people drinking mid-priced wine from Threshers. The people drinking mid-priced wine from Threshers tend to drink it either during an evening in, during a house party, or after they get home from the pub.

The people who get drunk and lairy in the streets tend to drink either in pubs/bars or on benches, and tend to drink either beer or whatever alcohol is cheapest by volume, respectively. And while £3.33 for a bottle of wine is budget, it’s a long way from the cheapest you can get – you can get three litres of strong cider for that kind of money.

Perhaps this complete ignorance is why Mr Jones is incapable of keeping order – his officers may well be under strict instructions to round up the wine drinkers first…

Oh, in a final piece of idiocy, Mr Jones claims he’s annoyed about the profit-making alcohol business ‘transferring its costs to the public’. He might conceivably have a point on this, were it not for the £13 billion a year that the industry pays in VAT and excise duty.

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