Thursday, 19 March 2009

The thin end of the wedge

There’s an excellent article by Rod Liddle in this week’s Spectator, with a distinct tone of “I told you so.”

Now, as we all expected, they have turned their attention to the consumption of alcohol — and those of you who enjoy the occasional tipple but do not smoke and were minded in the end to support the ban on smoking, well, this is what you have let yourselves in for. Smoking was always the thin end of the wedge. Drinking was always going to be next, followed very rapidly by punitive measures to stop you eating the sort of food that you enjoy. God knows what they will start on after that, but they’ll have a lot of fun with drinking before they are finished.
He says that a few years ago he used the phrase “passive drinking” in a satirical sense, only to see it seriously taken up by the odious Sir Liam Donaldson in his Puritanical crusade. Likewise, this idea of Rod’s may seem far-fetched, but are we likely to see it happen in the years to come?
Hell, perhaps we’ll see pubs forced to adopt drink-free areas, so that people who wish to live a healthy life can sip cranberry J2Os without the fear of being afflicted by passive drinking.
That, of course, would be the precursor to the total ban on alcohol in public places...

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1 comment:

  1. Dick Puddlecote19 March 2009 at 21:54

    It's a brilliant article, and adequately explains what I've been trying to for the last couple of years to explain to drinkers. Alan Johnson used the same analogy today about the similarity between non-smokers and non-drinkers.

    It's a template, it is being used, and the best thing to do to stop them is to obfuscate their every move.

    Still no collaboration from the likes of CAMRA on the smoking ban though. Why can they not see that by stating publicly what we all know, that the Health Act 2006 has helped destroy pubs, it puts a major stake through the heart of the current crusade against alcohol?

    All the time they carry on pretending it had no effect, it is merely adding fuel to Liam Donaldson's (and his DoH chums') argument, and hastens the demise of pubs.

    Lord knows I've tried to highlight it. It's like banging one's head against a crate of light ale though. ;-)

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