The problem, I would argue, is not 24-hour drinking, much less the fact that lager companies sponsor football trophies and tennis tournaments. We could talk for hours about how we change what officialspeak terms "attitudes to drinking" and make very little progress. So, try this: booze is far too cheap, and the case for a tax hike, along with action on supermarket discounting, therefore seems pretty much unanswerable. But faced with a titanic alliance of retail giants, brewers and pub chains - not to mention an electorate drinking for Britain - would any government dare make a move?
Though this conclusion is rather undermined by the previous paragraph which admits that there is a problem even in those areas where cheap booze is not available.
The article entirely neglects the fact - well known to the Treasury - that a tax hike on booze merely increases the huge flow into the UK of significantly cheaper booze acquired legitimately or illegitimately on the continent. I don't know what the answer is to the problem of excessive drinking but I doubt if increasing tax by 7 pence on a pint of beer and by 70 pence on a bottle of spirits will make a significant difference.
2 comments:
It's more a problem of attitude than availability, which is unfortunately a lot harder to counter.
I'm just back from France, where a decent bottle of wine is around 3 euros. You can go down to your local cave co-operative and fill up a five litre carton at around one Euro a litre. Yet despite this cheapness and availability, France doesn't have the visible signs of a "binge culture" as we have here.
I read once that the French have a lot of people drinking to excess in their homes, but there doesn't seem to be (Paris riots excepted) gangs of stocious young people roaming the streets causing trouble.
Surely making booze more expensive would increase binge drinking. When alcohol is more expensive, people will no longer drink in moderation. Instead they will save up for a massive binging session. This is what happens in the Nordic countries where alcohol tax is high.
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