It is of course health reasons that are quoted in evidence, although the BBC rather gives the game away with this:
The executive statistics indicated that 4% of 13-year-olds and 15% of 15-year-olds were regular smokers.
However, smoking by 13-year-olds had declined since 1998 from 9% to 3% among boys, and from 11% to 5% among girls. Among 15-year-olds, smoking had declined from a peak in 1996, from both 30% for boys and girls to 12% for boys and 18% among girls.
If the existing policy is working so well that it has reduced 15 year-old smokers from 30% to 15% within ten years, then why mess about with it?
And there is more bad news south of the border. The Times reports:
Middle-class wine drinkers will be the focus of government plans to make drunkenness as socially unacceptable as smoking, The Times has learnt.
Under the plans published today, a fresh audit is to be conducted by the Government into the overall costs of alcohol abuse to society and the National Health Service. “We want to target older drinkers, those that are maybe drinking one or two bottles of wine at home each evening,” a Whitehall source said.
OK, it may not apply to Scotland for now but can our new nationalist masters see a bandwagon without wanting to jump on it?
It would not be so bad if they really believed in the health arguments. Little old wine drinker me suspects they just hate to see people enjoying themselves. I fear that emigration may be the only answer.
3 comments:
It saddens me to think that 16 and 17 year olds will not be able to enjoy the great flavour of tobacco without sourcing it illicitly.
Truly we are being robbed of all the things that make life worth living.
Emigration was the only option under New Labour/McConnell (I now live abroad) and you can be sure that they would have been all over something like this like flies on shit.
Whilst agreeing with your general points 100% I think it is also true that there is something in the British character (or perhaps it has developed in the past 20-30 years?) which means that many British people (and I don't necessarily exclude myself) don't know when to stop when it comes to consuming alcohol. This seems to be a feature mainly in northern European countries, much less often in Meditteranean ones.
I'm basically a wine drinker (never drink beer, rarely spirits) and it constantly amazes me at perfectly respectable dinner parties here just how much wine is consumed per head in Britain. In the two other countries in Europe I know best (France and Spain) my French or Spanish friends seem to drink much more moderately; a glass or two of wine each during the course of a meal is about the stretch of it, whereas in either France or Spain when I've had British visitors the wine consumption immediately goes through the roof.
I'm very much against the nanny-stateism Labour (and possibly the SNP) seem to specialise in, 'for our own good', but I think that a lot of people in the UK do have a problem, even if they are not 'alcoholics' as generally understood. However most people equally seem blithely unaware of the long-term effects, or even if they are aware seem simply not to care. Certainly I no longer quaff wine and port with the abandon I did when I was in my 20s ansd 30s - I think I'd be dead already if I'd continued down that route.
I am a life-long non-smoker, but was also much against the ban in Scotland last year (and soon in England) on libertarian grounds, but if I'm honest it is now much more pleasant to be in a pub or wine bar, knowing that I won't have to launder every item of clothing after each visit.
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