Friday 28 January 2011

The neo-Pros’ poster girl

There has been a lot of media interest recently in 21-year-old Laura Hall from Redditch who has been banned from every pub and bar in Britain. However, as Neil Davenport argues here, in reality this sad case is not so much an indictment of the evils of drink but of our society's failure to socialise young people properly, and banning her from pubs just serves to make the problem worse.

4 comments:

  1. It gives her that latter day notariaty known as 'celebrity'. 'Celebrities' seem like very sad people. I'm all for modernity but a bit of me craves for some of the social niceties from my parents era.

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  2. There's always going to be someone of extreme behaviour amongst any activity and the mainstream using this one and trying to press it onto everyone else as a basis for more prohibition is just typical. In olden days, mainstream messaging being carried on the way it is today would have the initiators publicly humiliated for being stupid. Instead we put the instigators for prohibition up on a pedestal and deify them. It's a world gone mad, turned upside down. Even if the girl can be said to drink heavily, which is putting it mildly perhaps, it's still her business, her right and certainly doesn't indicate a need for more prohibition.

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  3. My grandmother, who had 8 sisters, commented wrily how certain of her sisters acquired religion later in life when they were too old to do anything else anyway.

    I wonder whether the same principle applies to some of the anti-alcohol campaigners? Or perhaps it's regret that they didn't have a few burn-outs themselves when they were young.

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  4. interesting view from the rehab she was in: http://www.bromsgrovestandard.co.uk/comment-34032.html

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