Part 2: Smoking, drinking and obesity: a recent history of attacks

PART 2: DRINKING
Of course, your humble Devil has been tracking the progress of the denormalisation of drinking for a good long while now; many of the major stories were sumarised in this post in which I... er... commented on the proposed cigarette packet-style warning labels to appear on booze.

But it is because these fuckers always need to find something to ban in order to justify their own existence. So, fox-hunting and fags are nearly conquored, so it's time to move strongly against alcohol. We can hardly pretend to be surprised; the attacks have come fast and furious over the last few years: we had surgeon John Smith trying to limit people to three drinks a night, the EU Commission report on "passive drinking", health "experts" setting ludicrous "binge-drinking" definitions, the Preston police trying to ban "vertical drinking", the bloody EU (again) trying to curb alcohol advertising, the move to ensure that all drinks in pubs are served in plastic recepticles, and Patsy cocking Hewitt begging the Chancellor for some of that hot Polly-style lovin' much higher alcohol taxes.

This last was one of my more vitriolic posts and this one paragraph basically sums up my attitude towards all of these attempts to infringe on my freedom to get absolutely stoshus.

Go fuck youself, you stinking apology for a cunt of a human being; did I say human being? I meant hideous chicken-brained whore of a monkey's arse dipped in aubergine surprise—the surprise being that it is made of aubergines and shit, shit, shitty-shit-shit-shit—and mashed up with the pus-filled discharge of a diseased, eighty-year-old whore's raddled, smelly and very badly-packed kebab. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you cunting cunt cuntitty cunt cunt. Tit.

So there.

Where do we find these bloody parasitic busybodies, eh? We are crying out for more scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, doctors, nurses, anyone competent and all we seem to end up with is these fucking killjoy scum.

Needless to say, the war on drinkers has escalated over the last few years: my colleague, The Filthy Smoker, covered some of the egregious lies and distortions being pushed by the government and its satellite fake charities only a few days ago. One of the things that he covered was the obviously faked "deaths from alcohol" figures...

According to the ONS, there were 509,090 deaths in England and Wales in 2008 and there were 6,541 deaths related to alcohol in England. That last figure doesn't include Wales so let's be generous and add a further 500 deaths for the sheep-worriers.

Which gives us a total number of about 7,000, or 1.38% of all deaths.

Of course, that doesn't give us the percentage for the whole of Europe, but seeing as we're supposedly some of the worst drinkers in Europe (another fucking lie), that should be considered a conservative estimate. Still nowhere near 10% though, is it? It's not even close to the 1 in 25—or 4%—claimed for the whole world, and for that global total you need to factor in a billion muslims who don't drink at all, plus God knows how many people who haven't got a pot to piss in, let alone a pub to get pissed in.

The thing is, as Costigan Quist pointed out (a tip of the horns to Dick Puddlecote and his rather good post around this subject), the British are not drinking significantly more than we used to.

Are we drinking more now than a decade ago?
No. You can look at all the data and see that pretty much everyone, men and women, all age groups, are drinking about the same as we were in 1992 and in 1996.

The only significant change I can see is that drinking amongst young people rose from 1994 to 2000, but has been falling since and is now back to where it started. Indeed, Conservatives might like to bear in mind that by far the biggest increase in young people drinking was from 1994-1997, in the second half of the Major administration.

The figures are confused because of the new alcohol units measurement. Remember that the number of units in drinks was recently revised upwards (there was a big advertising campaign, with the new unit value in foam on the beer glass and things like that). Some of the so-called increase seems to be down to this revision - the rises disappear in the like-for-like figures.

As an example, suppose you drink a glass of wine a day, which used to be one unit. The reality is that your alcohol consumption hasn't changed. If we jump onto the new figures, it looks like you're suddenly drinking more units (last year you drank 1 unit a day, this year you drink 1.5 units a day).

The Rowntree report shows both. Unless I've totally misunderstood the figures, it makes sense to compare like with like for trends. On the like-for-like figures, we're all drinking about the same - some a tiny bit more, some a bit less.

Has binge drinking for women doubled?
The shock headline is that twice as many women are binge drinking, but that appears to be utter rubbish.

It relies on this new units system. Funnily enough, if you count a glass of wine as 1.5 units instead of 1, the number of women drinking more that six units in any day suddenly rises. What a shock!

When you compare like with like, the proportion of men and women binge drinking is lower in 2006 (the latest year given in the study) than for any year in the last decade.

But, of course, we bloggers point all of this out in vain. For, as a few email correspondents pointed out to me, only a couple of days later some similar lies were wheeled out, by the state's mouthpiece, regarding alcohol mortality in the Scots.

Alcohol may have caused the death of twice as many Scots as previously thought, an NHS study has found.

Researchers used a new method of calculating alcohol-related deaths which is said to more accurately reflect the damage done by drinking.

By "more accurately", what they actually mean is that the study used a new method of lying—by chucking in all of the diseases, such as stomach cancer, that might possibly be caused by drinking (but for which there is little to no evidence, and which might be caused by many other things as well)—in order to provide some shock figures.

But why? Well, we'll come onto that.

The parallels with the attacks on smoking are alarming; indeed, the strategy is spelt out very clearly by the author of the Lancet study cited by the Filthy Smoker, above.

"The big message is treat alcohol like tobacco..."

The sequence is fairly simple really. The first thing that you do is to regulate the substance, e.g. through licensing, age restrictions, etc.; you need to concentrate on the health risks associated with the substance; you need to exaggerate the figures, by lying if necessary; then you need to appeal to those who don't like said substance and try to imply that they are suffering even if they do not indulge (e.g. second-hand smoke, third-hand smoke, passive drinking) to get them on board (after all, get a big enough minority and they'll be able to force their prejudice on others through the ballot box). All of these get the denormalisation ball rolling, and now you have enough support to start the legislative bans, and more subtle bans.

I have complained before about those signs in shops that insist that say things like...

If you look under 21, we will need ID of proof of age when purchasing alcohol.

My local Sainsbury's has changed it to 23 recently. Why? The drinking age is 18: why 21, or 23, or 25? And why would a shop try to restrict people from purchasing items? Because the state has insisted on it, through subtle or overt pressure. The state is denormalising the buying of alcohol.

And the bans? Well, they have started already.

More than 700 “controlled drinking zones” have been set up across England, giving police sweeping powers to confiscate beer and wine from anyone enjoying a quiet outdoor tipple.

Local authorities are introducing the zones at a rate of 100 a year, The Times has learnt. Some cover whole cities, a radical departure from what the law intended.

Yup, that's right: the law never intended that, eh? Don't fucking make me laugh: this is precisely what the law intended.

The signs all around the shops—much like the ones pertaining to tobacco, and the moves to push cigarettes under the counter—are to denormalise the buying of these substances.

These public bans are about denormalising the drinking of alcohol—in precisely the way in which they are attempting to stamp out smoking in films (or even to edit or erase cartoons that show it).

"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."—1984, George Orwell.

The thinking is that if people are not seen to be drinking or smoking, then these activities do not exist—or, rather, they are not normal.

Yes, at present people can smoke and drink in their homes and private cars but, as has been spelt out by the director of ASH Scotland, the state is moving to stop this too. Indeed, they have made a start, as far as alcohol is concerned, by advocating higher and higher age limits—with more dire and unrealistic warnings—for any kind of exposure to alcohol.

Once a control zone is in place, police can seize alcohol from anyone who is not on licensed premises, even if the bottles or cans are unopened. Although drinking is not banned in the zones, police can ask anyone to stop drinking and it is an offence to refuse, punishable by a maximum £500 fine. No explanation or suspicion that the person could be a public nuisance is required. The highest fine will soon rise to £2,500.
...

Laws giving local authorities the power to set up the zones, or “designated public place orders”, were introduced in 2001 at the height of government concern over public drunkenness.

Note that they were introduced because of "government concern"—with the stress firmly on the word "government". Generally, the people were not—and are not—screaming for bans on drinking in public.

The law made clear that the zones should cover only streets or city centre areas with a record of alcohol-related disorder or nuisance.

There are now 712 zones, some covering vast areas where there is no record of disorder. There are city-wide bans in Coventry and Brighton, which cover even the quietest suburban streets. Birmingham tried to introduce a city-wide ban but had to back down in the face of public opposition.

And has Birmingham respected the wishes of the public?

Instead it is introducing the drinking zones gradually across the city.

No. It is sneaking the ban through piecemeal, deliberately ignoring the wishes of the people of the city.

Camden in North London has a borough-wide ban, apart from Hampstead Heath, Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill. The Times has learnt that Lambeth in South London is planning to make the whole borough a controlled zone, with no exemptions, even in Brockwell Park, a local beauty spot that is popular with picnickers.

What? Fuck. Fucking Lambeth bastards...

Research on the zones has been conducted by The Manifesto Club, a campaign group that challenges what it sees as excessive regulation.

Note the careful use of the passive tense there—the media are on the government's side, make no mistake. An excellent example of this fawning can be seen on the BBC website where—despite a poll showing that the percentage of teenagers drinking weekly has dropped from 50% to 38%—the headline screams "Youngsters 'drinking dangerously'". OMG! Teh horrors!

It found that police are routinely ignoring Home Office guidelines and confiscating bottles of wine and beer from peaceful picnickers and other adults having a quiet drink outdoors. In some cases, drinks have allegedly been seized by police from adults who have just bought them from an off licence and are on their way home.

So, what have we got here?

Well, we have the police making up the laws as they go along, and with no comeback at all; the police are now a law unto themselves. We are, quite literally, living in a police state.

Most terrifyingly of all, to my mind, we have state agencies, like Birmingham, that have given up any kind of pretense of governing in the name of the people that they are supposed to serve.

The political classes are now so sure that the British people are too cowed to resist any of these hideous restrictions in their traditional freedoms that they feel able to do precisely what they want to do: and it is the sheer, terrifying confidence in the security of their tenure that really scares me.

We do not live in a democracy, or anything approaching one: we live in an elected dictatorship in which we live our lives by permission of—and only as far as—the oligarchy wish us to.

And they are about to deprive us of yet more of our rights and freedoms, as well as the services that we have paid for...

Source: The Devils Kitchen