There’s an excellent rebuttal of Sir Liam Donaldson’s proposals for minimum alcohol pricing from The Zythophile, a blog I must confess I had not come across before.
There’s the ridiculous claim that minimum unit pricing will be good for pubs, because there will be fewer people drinking cheap supermarket beer at home, they’ll all be going down the pub instead. Really? Even at 50p a unit, supermarket booze will still be cheaper than the pub - so how does that work, then?Yes, exactly what I’ve been saying, and a point the appeasers in the CAMRA leadership signally fail to grasp.
Conversely, and perhaps even more importantly, nowhere in the report will you see anything about the enormous benefits, social and economic, of alcohol, the way it binds society together, and the huge and lasting pleasures excellent wines, beers and spirits bring when consumed in moderation. What’s the economic value of all that? If you said every drinker received just £2-worth of pleasure from drinking alcohol every week, that’s £4.7 billion of drinking pleasure every year – so that’s the cost to the NHS outweighed, for a start.Absolutely, buy that man a pint!
(h/t Mr Eugenides)
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