Nannying fussbucketry - it's enough to drive you to drink!

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Tracey Crouch MP who is one of parliament's leading health fascists has sent out a 'report' from her All Party Parliamentary Group on Alcohol Abuse. It is - no surprise - a collection of every favoured piece of intervention from the temperance, New Puritan and prohibition campaigns - health warnings on wine bottles, lower drink-driving limits, minimum unit pricing for alcohol, advertising controls and - gleefully jumping on some nonsense from Gary Lineker - sponsorship bans.

The proposals says Tracey are needed because:

“We are experiencing nothing short of a national crisis in the UK because of alcohol – we need to act now to stop it.”

Now we know this is arrant nonsense - alcohol consumption has fallen by around 20% over the past decade and the sharpest falls have been among young people. We already have some of the highest taxes on booze in the world and we invest millions in nannying the hell out of drinkers.

But our Tracey knows better - she waves as £21bn 'cost of alcohol' figure as justification. Yet we also know that this figure - even if it is remotely accurate (which it isn't) - fails to take account of the benefits we get as a society from alcohol. Not just the pleasure a drink brings for most of the population but the wages of over a million people employed making, distributing and serving drinks. Plus the billions our economy gains from the export of drinks - whisky, gin, beer and assorted other drinks are a major export industry for the UK.

Tracey Crouch and her like are po-faced spoilsports, judgemental nannies who use the problems of a few to punish the pleasures of the many. Their proposals would make for a duller, less happy and more controlled society, one where tutting little fascists with clipboards patrol the lives of ordinary folk.

This nannying fussbucketry -it's enough to drive you to drink!

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