"I don't approve of you drinking" - Cameron's message to the English

The softening up process - the drip drip of judgemental leakage that typifies Cameronism - continues as we're warned about the new "Alcohol Strategy":

The plans, being driven by David Cameron, have raised fears that middle-class households will bear the brunt of measures supposedly aimed at troublemaking youths and other anti-social drinkers. 

Now when this all started it was driven by the recycling of old photographs in the Daily Mail. You know the ones I mean - attractive girl, drunk, draped over a bench. All accompanied by the dire description of our town centres as ridden with drunken violence. So minimum pricing was born - not to make us healthy but to get rid of the unsightly tramp, to discourage the baseball-cap wearing youth from quaffing cheap cider at the park gates and to end "pre-loading" thereby making town centres civilised places where people promenade between tea shops rather than stagger from bar to bar.

But it's not about that now. It's about you and me sitting at home, not bothering anyone and enjoying a glass of wine while watching the X-Factor:

“People shouldn’t think this is just about yobs getting drunk in parks and kids preloading before going out — this is going to affect respectable middle-class people popping into Waitrose for a couple of bottles of sauvignon blanc at the weekend.” 

So from a (misguided and misplaced) policy aimed at those buying cheap booze - by definition these folk don't shop at Waitrose let alone Booth's - we now have policies targeted at the myth of increasing alcohol consumption. It seems we will get a consultation - but it won't be about whether these proposals are a good or bad idea or even whether they will actually achieve what they claim.

Mr Cameron this year backed a 40p minimum unit price, but it is understood that the Home Office will next week seek views on a range of options for a minimum price for a unit of alcohol.

The policy is confused, won't achieve its stated aims, is illiberal, will promote rather than reduce crime and will close down a load of corner shops. And it will annoy people - not much but enough to flake a few more off the Tory branch. These people won't take to the streets in protest. They won't fill the pages of the Guardian or the BBC's bit of the airwaves with their voice.

But they will give both barrels of their opinion to the next Tory canvasser. And I don't blame them.


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