Ban advertising and increase tax on alcohol if you want to reduce alcohol consumption.

It could have a go.

I very much suspect in 6-8 months nobody will talk about this any more apart from a few politicians trying to score points using some specific event (last night there was a fight at my local pub at 2:00am, so the whole of the UK must have descended into anarchy…).

Anyone remember the floods of immigrants we would see coming to the UK when the new countries joined the EU?

When I was first learning how to drink, most alcoholic beverages did not appeal to the immature palate. Beer was bitter, wine was sour and whisky hurt on the way down. You had to take it slow and learn how to drink. At the same time, you learned your limits. Also, these ‘interesting’ alcohols were self limiting. You usually started to get uncomfortable before you got paralytic.

This did not suit the modern drinks industry. They have carefully formulated drinks that you don’t need to grow into. Not just alcopops, but insipid, sweet, hopless beers that are easy to swig. There is no rough to go with the smooth. It is simply possible to drink them too fast without noticing.

Of course, there is no way that the State can intervene here (though a Minister for Decent Beer would not be a bad thing).

Me, I want to give Gordon a warm Scottish greeting. Maybe two or three.

As for the “you cannot drink non-stop”, my memory may be playing me false here, but I’m sure Jack Kerouac tried that one: he drank two days straight, and woke covered in shit curled round a toilet. (I think it’s in “On the Road.”) But it’s do-able. Jimmy Greaves, George Best and others played top level football after a breakfast of vodka. The human body adapts.

There was a brewer in the Torygraph yesterday, who said that the same effect could have been achieved by deregulation. And I agree. The old licencing hours were the interfering government from WWI. We didn’t need them. They weren’t the government’s business. If they had beaten an honest retreat — “We won’t bother your pleasures any more” — I’d be all for this. But this is the government which think a quiet fag is a crime.

I rant about this all the time. The Nazis banned fox hunting. And smoking. And then they gassed the jews.

Contra Hegel, some us learned from history. Blair has never done anything for the common good. He’s always been prostrate before power, whether he’s called it God or the USA. The World According to Leo Blair.

If it were up to me, we’d legalise everything, prostitution (because what else is marriage — and that’s Mary Shelley), hard drugs, guns, 24 hour drinking. I’m as keen on this gesture as a gladiator is on an Emperor’s thumb’s up. We all have to go through it again.

What was it the Clash sang? ” They wore the black flag; they sang the red one”? Let’s rise like lions from the slumber. “What do we have to lose?” “Our chains” In unvanquishable number. Freedom. Not because they let us. But because they can’t stop us.

Let’s rise and mash Blair’s knees with crowbars. Rape his arse with smashed bottles. He was all for liberation, and that’s how liberated countries ask questions, so these aren’t obsence actions: these are necessary. After all, terrorist suspects may have ordered bombings. Of course, Blair never ordered anyone killed. And I wouldn’t ask for his death, for I, like Vladimir Putin (or indeed, Blair’s fellow god-botherer, Torquemada), believe in decency. I’m not advocating violence. I’m just saying “do unto them as they do unto others” and that happens to include electrocution and rape with bottles. There may be a moral there somewhere.

The automatic assumption that you only want to buy alcohol in a supermarket late at night because you want it immediately is both blinkered and wrong..It’s not often I get to say this, it’s hard to type it up, my keyboard is rebelling. But, on this o…