A little contrast...

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Yesterday, amid great fanfare, the Parliamentary Science & Technology Committee announced the latest push to 'denormalise' alcohol featuring the "have two days of booze" in a week argument. An argument that presumably applies to Mildred who has one small glass of white wine with the dinner she eats in front of the telly every evening as well as to the toothless street drinker.

Alcohol is bad - look at the drain on the economy, look at how many people (using our lunatic method of calculation for such things) are filling up casualty! So up goes the duty, the nasty nationalist, lefties in Scotland bung in a minimum price and the result is:

The investigation by HMRC uncovered the unregulated and fire hazardous industrial unit at Moscow Farm, near Great Dalby, during raids in September 2009. They seized nine thousand bottles of fake vodka, branded as Glen’s, 25,000 litres of pure denatured alcohol (enough to make around 100,000 bottles of vodka), manufacturing equipment, bottles and counterfeit packaging – labels and cardboard boxes.

Evidence showed around 165,000 bottles of the fake vodka had been distributed across the UK for sale. 

Today, in contrast, £30 million in extra public funding was directed towards another cause of lifestyle-related admissions to hospital (over 250,000 of them each year) - sport. But unlike alcohol, exercise is a good thing so merits a celebratory press release:

The Centre will be truly national – promoting sport and exercise medicine – made up of three network partners around the country. The Health Secretary made the announcement today while visiting Loughborough University, one of the network partners.

The Centre will help more people to be more active, treat injuries caused by exercise and conditions associated with lack of exercise.

If the consumption of alcohol by adults was treated the same way, I'd like to bet we'd have much less of a problem.

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