The drunk tank (or how people need to do business planning before proposing business solutions)

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I resisted the temptation to post a video of Fairytale of New York. After all it opens with these words:

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me,
Won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

So our top coppers - or at least one of them - wants to introduce these things to deal with the 'scourge' of binge drinking:

So why don’t we take them to a drunk cell owned by a commercial company and get the commercial company to look after them during the night until they are sober? 

Thus cries Adrian Lee, Chief Constable of Northamptonshire (and ACPO spokesman on drink - a sort of nannying fussbucket's nannying fussbucket).

Leaving aside the fussbucketry of this proposal, it seems to me that there are insufficient drunks - or at least drunks that the cops arrest - to sustain a private market in drying them out overnight. Even at £400 a throw.

Let's start with the stats:

More than 31,000 people were given a fixed penalty for the offence last year, although it is not known how many of those would have been so drunk that they had to be held in a cell overnight. 

Assuming that half of these people were incapacitated, that's 15,500 drunks headed for the drunk tank to while away the time singing old Irish songs (or whatever).  There are 42 police forces in England and Wales (I've not included the transport police, nuclear police, MoD police and City of London). That's 370 per year on average per authority - which is about one per day.  Even if all those 31,000 had to be held over night it's still only two a day - at £400 a pop that's not a viable business.

This proposal achieved its aim - it got Mr Lee a headline. The sad thing is that, admidst all the debate about the sense or ethics of the idea, nobody thought to ask whether it was actually viable as a business. I'm guessing you might make it work in Central London and perhaps in one or two big cities (Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester) where the numbers are greater.

Unless, of course, Mr Lee is planning for a time when we arrest people for drinking!

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But binge drinking?

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It's destroying our town centres surely?

“Every night, in town centres, hospitals and police stations across the country, people have to cope with the consequences of alcohol abuse. And the problem is getting worse. Over the last decade we’ve seen a frightening growth in the number of people — many under age — who think it’s acceptable for people to get drunk in public in ways that wreck lives, spread fear and increase crime. This is one of the scandals of our society and I am determined to deal with it.” 

I'll give David Cameron the benefit of the doubt and say he's merely ignorant rather than wilfully misleading. Because he's wrong - here's CAMRA on young people drinking:
  

“The percentage of young pub goers (18-24 year olds) visiting the pub regularly – once a week or more – has plummeted from 38% to 16% since 2005.”

And this is reflected in the parallel fact that per capita consumption of alcohol - especially by young men - has fallen year after year for the last decade.

Not that you'd know from the news of course!


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Come on you New Puritans, lighten up and let people live a little?

The world now knows just how annoyingly officious British authorities have become:

E-Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt also took to Twitter to express his outrage. He said the stars had planned a final encore number before the sound was cut off.

The 61-year-old said: 'One of the great gigs ever in my opinion. But seriously, when did England become a police state? Is there just too much fun in the world? We would have been off by 11 if we'd done one more. On a Saturday night! Who were we disturbing?

This was a big deal but we’re pointing the finger at the wrong target. The truth is that, had Westminster Council allowed the event to run even a minute past the allotted finish time – the licence – that killjoy with a stopwatch somewhere within earshot of Hyde Park would have been on to them threatening action.

We have become the antithesis of ‘live and let live’, a nation of nosey parkers, busybodies and fussbuckets. Too many people are ready to point out every last minute infringement – just so long as it’s done safely by ringing up (or these days e-mailing) the authorities.

We seem unable to allow other people to have a modicum of pleasure. Youngsters making some noise in the town square after a good night? Binge drinking – get it stopped! Introduce curfews, ban outside drinking – whatever it takes get them away from where they might (just might) offend our ears or eyes.

A karaoke night at the local round the corner on a warm summer night (oh, for one of those) – a few folk stray outside for a smoke or perhaps a snog. And we’re on to the authorities about the pub’s license the next day. How dare these people enjoy themselves in my presence?

Or the wedding party at the club – good times, dads dancing, uncles getting a little drunk and cousins simpering over the best man. And children running around getting under everyone’s feet, wallowing in the excitement of staying up late. Nine o’clock arrives and our busybody is complaining - the licence says no children after 9pm.

Everywhere I look, I see fun being spoiled by our inability to let others live a little. We seem unable to tolerate a few minutes inconvenience so as to allow others to celebrate. We’ve forgotten that urban places – and we most of us live in urban places – are sometimes noisy. And we seem to believe that licensing – the exercise of mostly pointless control – is the way to proceed.

I recall, on one of those warm summer evenings, sitting outside a nice bar on Street Lane in Leeds only to be ushered inside at eleven “because of the licence”. So fifteen or so (anything but young) people dutifully traipsed inside, finished our drinks and then went home. Our pleasure was curtailed because some official in that big wedding cake building in the middle of Leeds, backed up by councillors and urged on by fussbuckets had decreed that drinking outside a quiet bar in the posh northern suburbs of the city represents the precursor to drunken violence, mayhem and chaos (and might be a little noisy).

Can’t we arrive at a place where we no longer have the officious enforcement of arbitrary time restrictions and move instead to a place where we agree reasonable behaviour? A world where every now and then it’s OK for a few (hopefully well-behaved) children to remain after nine? Where a group of no longer young folk can sit outside a bar after eleven on a warm evening (when they’re doing no-one any harm)?

And where thousands of people who’ve paid a lot of money to watch a concert (and aren’t about to riot) get to see the full set because someone’s seen sense and allowed the band a little bit of leeway on finishing time.

But I guess this won’t happen. It seems the new Puritans have won. And we are a worse nation for it.

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Scotland introduces another tax on the poor...

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...and pretends it's about health.

Minimum pricing for alcohol - which arrives in Scotland courtesy of their Chief Nanny, Nicola Sturgeon - is simply an impost on those least able to afford. Its proponents gleefully tell us that it won't make a jot of difference to those of us already buying pricier wine or drinking in pubs.

Which means that it is going to affect those folk buying cheap drink - the poorest. Indeed, the entire argument for minimum pricing is based on the same judgement that Titus Salt used to ban drinking among his workforce while serving wine to his guests up at the big house. The poor can't be trusted with the demon drink whereas the sort of folk that Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon socialise with are just fine.

The truth of all this is that what many of minimum pricing's advocates dislike isn't that young people (it's always young people having a good time who these people condemn) drink but that they do so publicly, that they are not embarrassed by occasional over-indulgence and that this drinking is accompanied by loudness, lewdness and insufficient demureness in female dress.

And a special opprobrium is reserved for those who - for whatever reason - opt for al fresco, impromptu drinking. Not the street drinking regulars (although the same folk who want minimum pricing also prefer to move these drinkers out of sight rather than doing something to help them out) but the kids on the park wall with a couple of cans and a plastic bottle of cider. Especially if those youngsters look a little too lower class for normal folk.

Sadly - for the drinkers who pay more and for those concerned about alcohol harm reduction - the minimum pricing proposals won't change a thing. Of course, some research from within nannying fussbucket circles, will show how admissions to hospital have fallen or some such conclusion - on the back of spending one evening at two hospitals. The usual advocates of temperance will be rolled out to say that more must be done and the media will grasp at another campaign to "solve" the "problem" of drinking and our "binge-drinking culture".

As Janet Hood in the Scotsman recently reminded us, back when drink was expensive, licensing laws were tighter and police really did arrest people for being drunk and disorderly there was still a problem:

I went to university in the mid-70s when alcohol was considerably more expensive than today. I remember my first stroll around the city that was to be my home for four years. Edinburgh was amazing! I wound my way through its ancient streets until I came to the Grassmarket, where I encountered the “good ole boys” who were not “drinking whisky and rye” but meths and milk enlivened with hairspray. 

Minimum pricing is simply a tax on the honest poor imposed by morally judgemental middle-class doctors, lawyers and politicians. It is obscene.

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Do the LGA want to kill off all the pubs?

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It seems that way. Not content with being cheerleaders for even more draconian smoking controls, the LGA now wants an extra tax on pubs and clubs:

The Local Government Association is calling for pubs and clubs to help meet the costs of cleaning up after binge drinkers.

In this matter the LGA is merely agreeing with the government who want a "late night levy" - as if opening late is somehow the drive for binge-drinking. Longer hours have the very opposite effect - just look at the six o'clock swill for heavens sake!

What really annoys these local government folk is that most of that new tax would go to the police (for, like, doing the job we pay them to do). And so we add more costs to businesses that are already struggling under the weight of unwanted regulation brought in on the basis of sloppy science and a downright lie.

Don't the LGA want any pubs and clubs to stay open?

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On alcohol statistics...

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The chart in this blog from Straight Statistics' Nigel Hawkes underlines the lie of an increasing alcohol problem:

An increasing problem? Seems not.

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Save us from the nannying fussbuckets...

The Prime Minister - tempted here to call him "nannying-fussbucket-in-chief" - has visited a hospital somewhere in the North East where he's chosen to share his wisdom with us on the matter of alcohol. We're told:

...the last decade has seen a "frightening growth" in the number of people who think it is "acceptable for people to get drunk in public in ways that wreck lives, spread fear and increase crime", many of them under the legal drinking age.

A frightening growth, Mr Cameron? Show us where it's hiding for the truth is that consumption of alcohol, alcohol-related crime or anti-social behaviour and the incidence of binge-drinking have fallen over the past ten years. Yes, folks - fallen.  And the biggest fall in consumption has been among 18-24 year-old men.

So why do the nannying fussbuckets keeping on with this "growing problem" nonsense?

The objective of course is prohibition - the "denormalisation" of drinking. This is, for the Church of Public Health, a moral crusade, the abolition of a normal pleasure for millions of people simply because these people - these nannying fussbuckets - disapprove of it.

Injury from sports and physical exercise costs the NHS more than drinking does - the hospitals are filled with people suffering from breaks and sprains, bashes and bruises. Yet no-one is calling for rugby or horse-riding to be banned or for a gym tax.

These people simply disapprove of people drinking - especially young working class men.

So I have a suggestion for Mr Cameron - next time you want to make announcements about boozing make them in a busy pub in front of real live drinkers. See how they respond!

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It isn’t the drinkers we should worry about but the warped folk who hate drinking

Today the government published its Public HealthFramework setting out the purpose and objectives of this part of health spending. I don’t propose to spend a great deal of time boring you to death with what it contains. Suffice it to say that the devil will be in how the details are interpreted by the public health practitioners on the ground (we can expect still more of the ill-informed campaigns about booze, fags and burgers).

Nevertheless, here’s a flavour:

The whole system will be refocused around achieving positive health outcomes for the population and reducing inequalities in health, rather than focused on process targets, and will not be used to performance manage local areas. This Public Health Outcomes Framework sets the context for the system, from local to national level. The framework will set out the broad range of opportunities to improve and protect health across the life course and to reduce inequalities in health that still persist.

Now that’s clear, I’d like to talk about the “public health problem” that is drinking. And to ask – notwithstanding the liberal argument that it’s none of the government’s business – what the best strategy is to reducing the overall harm caused by alcohol. Currently the medical and public health professions argue for draconian measures:

Effective, evidenced-based public health measures do not include nudging people into healthy behaviours or getting NHS staff to lecture patients on healthy lifestyles. They include measures such as raising taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, fatty foods, and sugary drinks, reducing junk food and drink advertising to children, and restricting hours on sale of alcoholic drinks. 

Yet, as the government acknowledge, such an approach hasn’t worked in Finland:

“We are working in a very, very cynical environment at the moment where nobody believes we can do anything on alcohol consumption unless we price it out of the market. Finland would suggest that doesn’t work.”

So, instead of looking at these aggressive fiscal and regulatory measures, we should perhaps consider whether liberalisation might work. There is some evidence that society’s attitude to drinking is an important factor in its impact:

We, as a culture, set the rules. When they're broken it's not solely the fault of a drink or even five. It's the underlying message accompanying the way that we drink. That's something I believe we can change by recognizing drinking as a meaningful activity and by addressing problem drinking, which involves a more complete assessment, with culturally relevant programs and not with fruitless pleas to "drink less."

When the last Labour government liberalised licensing regulations (in 2003), there was an outcry from the grumpier tabloids. We were told that “24-hour drinking” would result in chaos as crime rose, disease spread and hospitals filled up with fighting drunken youth. So what’s the truth of this liberalisation?

Using the original method of conversion to units for comparability with earlier years, in 2006, men drank an average of 14.9 units a week (equivalent to about seven and a half pints of beer), around 2.3 units less than they were drinking in 1998. Average weekly consumption among women increased from 6.5 units in 1998 to 7.6 units in 2002 but had decreased to 6.3 units in 2006

OK, so I won’t (unlike too many public health people) make a causal link here but, since the liberalisation of alcohol licensing, consumption has fallen steadily and continues to fall. Far from the changes resulting in an epidemic of binge-drinking, we have seen an increase in more responsible, moderate attitudes to drinking. And the biggest fall (according to the ONS and NHS) in consumption has been among 18-24 year old men.

It seems that greater awareness of the risks associated with drinking and a society that sees drinking in moderation as a good, sociable thing to do, results in alcohol becoming less of a problem. Yet we still hear – almost without cease – how alcohol is a scourge. Here’s an American take – but it could be the UK:

The CDC tells us that binge drinking is a "bigger problem than previously thought," suggesting that it can (and often does) result in risky behavior, leading to violence, suicide, spread of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancy, car crashes, and alcohol dependence. They also insinuate that binge drinking causes crime. By their measure, binge drinkers rack up over 223 billion dollars annually.

Yet most drinkers – including plenty who binge – don’t do any of these things. They don’t start fights, spread disease, kill themselves, get the girlfriend pregnant or wind up in hospital. They go home, go to bed and get up the following day to continue their otherwise normal lives. The liberalisation of licensing was a boon to these folk.

It meant they didn’t get tempted to buy three drinks at ten to eleven and drink them before getting turfed out at twenty past. It allowed them to finish their conversations, savour the last part of the wine or maybe a whisky and then make their way home with the gentle buzz of a good night.

The people who want us to be monitored, questioned, lectured, nagged – “denormalised” to use the chosen term – are those who want to spoil the pleasure of a drink for the outside chance of there being one or two fewer chronic alcoholics. It won’t work, it will spoil people’s pleasure and it is an act of bitter prejudice against something that has been part of human culture since we first stepped out from the African forests millions of years ago.

It isn’t the drinkers we should worry about but the warped folk who hate drinking – they are the ones who should be stopped. Banned maybe?

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There isn't an epidemic of drinking - that is a lie, Panorama

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Last night's Panorama - and a great deal of the coverage elsewhere on the telly and in the newspapers - represents a triumph for the New Puritans. I had planned to take you all though the errors and omissions in the programme (once I'd watched it in its entirety without throwing stuff at the telly) but needn't bother as Chris Snowdon has done an excellent job at VGIF:

Exceptional policies like these require exceptional circumstances and Panorama spent thirty minutes telling the viewer that Britain is indeed in crisis. Enormous quantities are being drunk at exceptionally low prices, they said, therefore prices need to rise. Something must be done.

Pretty much every assumption in this narrative is wrong. Whether judged by the standard of other countries or by the standard of previous eras, this country is not in the grip of an alcohol epidemic.

Do read the rest of Chris's piece - he reminds us that we are not drinking at historically high levels, that alcohol consumption is falling and that our alcohol prices are not higher that in the past nor are our tax levels lower than elsewhere in the world.

There isn't a epidemic of drinking. That is a lie.

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Public health and private choice - thoughts on a consultation

This afternoon I attended a Public Health Consultation event organised (because I insisted) to allow Bradford councillors to have some input into the PCT/Council response to the Public Health White Paper. Obviously our input was constrained by time but we managed to comment at length on:

Domains and Indicators from Healthy Lives, Healthy People: Transparency in Outcomes: Proposals for a Public Health Outcomes Framework

And:

Commissioning and funding from Healthy Lives Healthy People: Consultation on the funding and commissioning routes for public health

In this discussion we looked at the different “measures” that might be applied to the assessment of public health effectiveness and hence the likelihood of Bradford Council receiving the “Health Premium” promised to Councils meeting targets. In listening to this – and looking at the targets – it struck me that there is an interesting and important discussion to be had as to what we actually mean by the term “public health”.

What seems clear to me is that the domain of public health – our concern to do something about external and environmental factors contributing to disease and ill-health – has expanded to encompass things that are not external to individual choice. Hence the ‘new’ definition from the Faculty of Public Health:

“The science and art of promoting and protecting health and well-being, preventing ill health and prolonging life through the organised efforts of society.”

Public health is no longer concerned with externalities – with sanitation, with poor housing, with air pollution, with clean water – but with lifestyle choices deemed by “society” to be wrong. And the justification for this action is all couched in generic health outcomes, chiefly in “life expectancy” and “healthy life expectancy”.  Because, for example, reducing smoking is seen as improving overall “life expectancy” it becomes justified even though such interventions are not in areas of ‘public goods’.

Underlying this argument is the nature of the deal between the individual and the state – whether that deal in a collective or individual arrangement, between the ‘civic’ and the ‘personal’. And, most commonly, the argument is couched in terms of selfishness – my drinking, smoking or fatness means a greater burden on the NHS and less resource available to treat the illnesses of good people who eschew such a decadent lifestyle.

If however – as I believe is the case – my relationship with the state is a personal one, then this argument is false. I pay taxes, duties and other imposts in return for the state’s protection. And that protection applies to me personally not to me as part of a collective. My lifestyle choices – smoking, drinking, eating burgers, sky-diving, potholing, and so forth – are not a matter of public concern. Therefore public health cannot – as its proponents now argue – extend to controlling lifestyle choices but must be limited to public goods and to the impact of public services on health.

Nevertheless, the consultation paper on “proposed indicators” contains nine targets directly linked to levels of smoking, drinking or eating yet just two relating directly to housing. Yet housing conditions – damp, drafts, poor heating – are very significant factors in ill-health, arguably more significant that smoking, drinking or obesity. Add to this the incidence of ill-health linked to long-term unemployment and poverty and it is clear to me that the directing of around 60% of public health budgets to booze, fags and burgers is wholly misplaced – even if we accept the argument that there is a need to develop responses to these “problems”.

In the end, the experts – those nannying fussbuckets of the Faculty of Public Health – will win the day and the funding will go to continue the current strategy. And this is despite all the evidence that this strategy is failing to deal with the problem it intends to deal with (too much drinking, smoking and burger-eating). At the meeting I pointed out that reports of liver disease had risen during a time when the consumption of alcohol was falling – the answer to this conundrum is that the problem drinkers are drinking more ergo more liver disease!  I’m not sure that I believe this – the problem may relate more to the increase in drinking during the 1980s and the lag in presentation for liver conditions.

While I enjoyed the meeting and made a substantial and, hopefully, substantive contribution, I expect that we will end up with a centrally directed, nannying (or should I say nudging) approach focused – to the exclusion of almost everything else – on the poor lifestyle choices that some people make. And it won’t work – the single mum on the sixth floor of a council block will still want cheap stimuli, the little cheers and buzzes that get her through an otherwise crap life. Which means she’ll carry on smoking, drinking, enjoying sex, eating crisps or chocolate and watching telly – those things are her pleasures and telling her it’s bad for her won’t change a thing.

 If you want to change her outlook – or the outlook of a million or so other folk – you have to change economic prospects, improve the housing and clean up the locality. And all the public health fussbucketry won’t achieve any of that, will it?

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So there isn't an epidemic of drunken debauchery after all!

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A couple of week ago I wrote this about the authors of the lastest anti-alcohol diatribe:

In truth these authors aren’t concerned doctors at all but hardcore advocates of prohibition and their prescription for the evils of alcohol is to remove ease of access for all of us rather than to deal with the psychology that leads to alcohol abuse and related problems.

Turns out that I was right again about the extent to which Prof Ian Gilmore and his friends just make stuff up to provide the answers that suit their argument. This was - to remind you, the good doctors' argument:

“Few can doubt that there is a particular problem in the UK” and pointed to rapidly rising levels of deaths from liver disease.

You will also recall that our doctors also made up a speculative (but suitably big) number of deaths - 250,000 - that would occur if we didn't act to reduce general "access" to alcohol and raise its price.  So what's the truth about drinking - and specifically so-called binge drinking?

Since 2001/2 levels of alcohol consumption outside the home - you know the behaviour that the telly and the papers like to focus on - have fallen by 40% (according the the Office for National Statistics). In the home consumption has only fallen by 4% - which not only starts to explain why all the pubs are closing but shows that total levels of alcohol consumption have fallen. We are - for whatever reason - drinking less.

As to the "rapidly rising levels of liver disease":

The UK figure for 2009 (10.82) is lower than that for any year since 2002 (10.44).

With falling levels of alcohol consumption we have to expect that this will be reflected in falling levels of liver disease - if, as Prof Gilmore and his mates assert, alcohol is the primary contributor to such disease. But that wouldn't fit their increasing and increasingly shrill cries for "a minimum price for alcohol" and a host of other "denormalisation" efforts.

These puritans - Gilmore is an active member of the UK's temperance movement - seek to destroy the pleasures of ordinary people on the basis of what is an almost wholly spurious public health argument. Read this, for example:

They do not count any of the benefits of alcohol, coincidentally the subject of a meta-analysis in the latest BMJ which pooled data from 84 previous studies. This showed that the risk of dying from all causes was 13 per cent lower in drinkers than in non-drinkers. The effect is largely due to a 25 per cent reduction in heart deaths among moderate drinkers. 

Where was that when the Professor was putting together his collection of convenient fictions?

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There's no evidence that it works but let's put up booze prices anyway!

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The Government in an especially populist move plans to impose some form of minimum price for alcohol so as to address the problems of "binge drinking" (an almost entirely mythical pastime). Here are the headlines of the Home Office's research assessment for this policy:

• On balance the evidence shows that increases in alcohol prices are linked to decreases in harms related to alcohol consumption. However, alcohol price is only one factor affecting levels of alcohol consumption with individual, cultural, situational and social factors also influential.
• Available evidence suggests that increases in alcohol prices tend to be associated with reductions in crime. However, this relationship is not straightforward and linear and the evidence base is not able to support a causal relationship between alcohol pricing and crime.
• When considering individual crime types rather than overall crime, there is a larger evidence base for a link between alcohol price and violence than for other crime types. The balance of this evidence tends to support an association between increasing alcohol price and decreasing levels of violence. No firm conclusions can be drawn around links between alcohol pricing and other specific crime types as the evidence is limited and some findings are inconclusive.
• It is important to recognise that inconclusive evidence or an absence of evidence does not necessarily mean that increasing alcohol price does not impact on particular types of crime. Rather, this indicates that there is a lack of robust evidence to allow a judgement to be made either way.
• Focus groups, designed to test reactions to pricing policies, reported an overall consensus of respondents not wanting to see an increase in the price of alcohol. There was conflict between a belief that only large price increases would have an impact on crime and disorder and a reluctance to be subject to such price increases.
• The modest evidence available on workplace productivity indicates a negative correlation with alcohol consumption (rather than price per se) but this evidence is not able to support a causal relationship for a link with alcohol pricing.
• Overall the research literature supports an established association between alcohol consumption and many negative health outcomes and the balance of research finds that increases in alcohol prices are linked to decreases in these health harms.

So the research doesn't show that minimum pricing has any effect - other than a marginal health impact -  and people don't want the Government to put prices up. Yet that's what they propose to do!

And who does it hurt most? Let me tell you.

We're at the super-market checkout and there's an old bloke in the queue ahead of us. He has some food items plus three cans of cheap lager that he got off the bin end shelf. To pay he scrabbled around in his purse to get together the money. Now I suppose he might be an eccentric multi-millionaire but he's more likely to be an old bloke without much money who lives on his own and likes a beer or two while watching telly on a Sunday. He's the person the Government is punishing with their stupid policy - not the so-called 'binge-drinker' and certainly not those dreadful middle-class boozers who are killing themselves with Pinot Grigio and Cab Sav!

Sometimes it's enough to make you cry!

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Liberal licensing laws have worked - why scrap them?

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A few cheap headlines are worth a lie it seems – we all know that “24-hour drinking” has been a scourge, that towns and villages are visited by a terrible plague of drunken youths tearing the place up. I hate to disabuse you all.

Alcohol consumption has fallen since the liberalisation of licensing laws – yes folks we’re drinking less

Alcohol-related emergency admissions to hospitals have also fallen since the liberalisation of licensing laws

Levels of violent crime – and especially alcohol-related violent crime – have fallen in the same period

Nowhere have these facts been set out – at best the “24-hour drinking” rules have had a positive impact on our drinking habits and at worst they have made no difference. Any changes are just a knee jerk reaction to the ignorant and worse to the new prohibitionists who’d rather like drink to be banned along with any other slight risqué pleasure.

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Look, you puritans, students want to have some fun - and a drink!

Now I know he has just packed his precious daughter off to college but this article by Max Davidson in the Sunday Telegraph is truly, unutterably awful. It's inaccurate, stigmatises students, assumes they're all drunken louts and credits none of them with a modicum of common.

Davidson is wrong. The students I know are pleasant, hard-working, interested and yes, occasionally they get drunk and have a good time. Get used Max.