The ThunderDragon

For crying out loud. Why does the Royal College of Physicians keep regularly making statements about how bad alcohol is, and that it must be taxed more and more and more? They made the same call back in November when there was a “20% rise in hospital admissions in England over the last five years” due to excessive alcohol consumption.

Now they are calling for both more taxes on alcohol, and a total ban on alcohol advertising:

“The evidence around price and availability of alcohol is that it is very cheap in the UK and has never been more available…
We really are quite liberal in comparison with many countries.
I think it would be hard to move to a total advertising ban straight away, but we can work towards it.
Most urgently we should look at introducing a watershed, with a move towards a complete ban. Many people do enjoy a drink, but we cannot ignore the rising tide of deaths from cirrhosis (of the liver).” (The Telegraph)

To support his argument for the banning of alcohol ads, Professor Gilmore said that he had “recently watched a football match on satellite television which had shown four alcohol advertisements over the course of a lunchtime [and that] [h]is nine-year-old nephew also has a Liverpool shirt with the Carlsberg logo [on it].” Yes, and? Why on earth does that mean that alcohol adverts are evil and therefore must be banned? Because children might see them and be attracted into buying alcohol? Don’t be stupid.

Under-age children will always want to drink alcohol, and simply not advertising it will lead more to them not having any clue what any of they types of drink are, so that when they do, inevitably, go and get alcohol to drink, they have no idea what they are drinking - and those who don’t want to won’t know what to avoid.

When it comes to the ridiculous argument he makes about the Carlsberg logo on the Liverpool shirt, he has even less of a leg to stand on. The lives of footballers are far more likely to persuade children to drink, seeing it as “cool” or whatever - who pays attention to the logo on the front of a the shirt? I know I don’t.

Whilst alcohol abuse may well be a problem, the way to deal with it is not through banning advertising from alcohol companies. To start with, this would lead to an decrease in the cost of alcohol, because companies would no longer be spending lots of money on advertising. Professor Gilmore already thinks that alcohol is too cheap, but if he gets his way on a total ban on alcohol ads, it will just get cheaper.

The only way to deal with alcohol problems is through education. And not the preaching of medical professionals or the zealousness of the recovered alcoholic, but through simple education of the facts. I remember when we were given a talk on the “evils” of alcohol at school. We all ignored it, because of the way in which it was presented. Less preaching “holier than thou” attitudes are needed, and more simple education about how alcohol can affect the body, especially when ingested in excessively large amounts.

Since they have “won” the smoking argument, having got a law passed to make it basically illegal in most public places, they have now moved onto alcohol. We must not let them continually wear away our civil liberties to do what we like with out own bodies, all the while hiding under the veil of “healthcare”.

Sources: The Telegraph, BBC

The Sun’s front page today leads:

“A TEENAGE hoodie told last night how he ran up behind Tory leader David Cameron and pretended to shoot him.
Tagged thug Ryan Florence, 17, said he made the sick gun gesture to impress gang pals who were watching.
The yob in a gang called Benchill Mad Dogs struck when Mr Cameron was visiting a crime-ridden council estate in Manchester to speak out on youth gun crime.” (The Sun)

Yet the hoodie-wearing teenager in the photo is quoted as saying:

“My mates thought it was well funny, but I didn’t know how important he was until somebody told me. The guy at our local gym told me he was an MP.”

So he didn’t have a clue who David Cameron was, and was just “showboat[ing] for the lads” - the fact that it happened to David Cameron rather than any other person was purely coincidence. It does make quite a good picture, though.

What it does mostly, though, is point out precisely Cameron’s point. We need to work on changing society so that the problems illustrated by the youth can be fixed - through providing incentives for families to stay together where possible, and getting money to the local community where it can be put to best use to prevent crime before it happens, and to give youths in deprived areas a real choice.

“Could ‘Pom Power’ help decide the next UK election? Certainly, the idea seems to have taken hold at Conservative Party headquarters.
Party chairman Francis Maude has [gone] to Australia in search of electoral gold: the 500,000 British expatriates whose votes he believes could help make David Cameron the next prime minister.” (BBC)

To this end, a new website, Don’t Leave Your Vote At Home, has been launched with the aim of tapping into the (up to) 5.5million expats. If you are a British citizen over 18 years of age, who has been abroad for less than fifteen years then you can vote in British elections through postal votes, proxy votes, or returning to Britain to vote personally in the last constituency where they were registered.

But why bother with trying to get votes from expats? They’ve left Britain after all! But, as Francis Maude points out, “[y]ou don’t lose interest in your home country when you move abroad.” And we have prime examples of this in the blogosphere: PragueTory, Tom Paine and James Higham. Especially since “[t]he Conservatives have already identified the expat equivalent of three swing constituencies: Perth, Sydney, and, appropriately enough, the Gold Coast” then it is worth making the attempt to get expats to vote, despite the laboriousness of the current system.

Since many commentators are pointing towards the likelihood of a hung parliament at the next election, it may well be expats who can tip the balance.

… is a dead clown?

At least one person seems to think so.

Twelve-step programmes are everywhere. Twelve seems to be the magic number. Alcoholics and drug addicts have twelve-step programmes… and now so do email addicts.

What is an email addict? Someone for whom “email is managing them rather than the other way round… [they are] obsess[ed] [with] reading or replying to emails on holiday, in the car and even in the bathroom.” Sounds ridiculous to me. Who can be addicted to checking their emails, for crying out loud? Certainly to the extent of checking every few minutes and sending yourself a message if you haven’t received any. Anyone who is that obsessed, there is more than just an email addiction wrong with them!

Apparently “email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users” which certainly says something. ‘Technology: worse for you than drugs!’ is hardly a catchy phrase for the IT industry! Or maybe it just says something about those who get addicted to checking their emails.

Source: The Telegraph

One poll does not win an election, but this poll is certainly good reading for Conservatives, and very bad reading for Gordon Brown (especially on his birthday)! This is the highest the Conservatives have polled in any ICM poll since 1992, fifteen years ago. Were this result to be recreated in a general election, the Conservatives would win a majority in the House of Commons.

It’s too early to start measuring up for curtains, but it does look good for the future!

Whenever the issue of young people and politics is discussed, there are always claims being thrown about saying that young people are “disillusioned,” “disconnected” or simply “not interested” with politics. Statistics such as a “quarter [of young people] say they would not vote at all” are bandied about, usually followed by some hand-wringing about what can be done to “re-engage” the youth of Britain.

And then compare and contrast this with one of tonight’s topics on 18 Doughty Street’s BloggerTV: “We’ll be talking about why so many under 25s blog”.

How can these two contradictory statements both be right? Either Britain’s youth is politically disengaged, disillusioned and inactive, or they are politically active enough to blog on politics in large numbers.

What I would like to see is a break-down of how the “young” (as in under 25) political bloggers fall along the political spectrum.

• Do Labour gain from being the only government that most of my generation can clearly remember, or suffer because they are the only government that most of my generation can clearly remember?
• Do the Conservatives suffer because of the poor reputation of the last Tory government, or do they benefit because most of my generation can’t remember it?
• And does the Liberal Democrats opt-repeated claim to be the choice of young people actually hold up to scrutiny of their blogging representatives? Or, more likely in my opinion, do those who proclaim to support the LibDems actually do so because they are simply not the Conservatives or Labour rather than because of who they are?

I do not think that it is possible to claim that my generation is substantially more of less politically interested or involved than any other at the same age. It is in the nature of the young to not be interested in anything that cannot be easily perceived to directly affect them, and always will be. Statistics will always show the same things about the political interest of young people, and the older generations will always panic about them, forgetting that they were like that when they were that age.

Unfortunately I can’t watch BloggerTV live, however, (I have other things to do tonight, such as drinking) so I will have to watch it through the ‘On Demand’ feature later.

Labour has failed the NHS. And this is not just my view, but that of 56% of doctors, with “nearly twice as many doctors would trust the NHS with David Cameron, the Opposition Leader, than with Gordon Brown, though a larger number trust neither of them.”

They see the extra money ploughed into the NHS from the taxpayers pockets wasted on bureaucracy and expensive IT systems (which almost inevitably fall late and cost more than envisaged). And 79% of doctors doubted that the quality and high standards that are expected of the NHS could be sustained by taxation alone after 2008, when the huge annual injections of cash into the NHS stop.

Labour have failed to help the NHS, and are driving it to its destruction. When will they stop throwing taxpayers money into a black hole and actually reform the NHS?!

We’re all gonna die a painful death. There’s nothing left of the NHS.

Source: The Times

From Wednesday, Margaret Thatcher will again be watching over the Commons, only this time not in the form of the Iron Lady, but the Bronze Lady - a seven-foot bronze statue, in “debating” pose. It does, however, lack the famous handbag. The statue will be situated opposite another great Prime Minister of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill.

That she should be honoured in this way is undeniable. Whether you like her or loathe her, Margaret Thatcher’s influence on British politics was, and still remains, huge. After all, even Tony Banks believed that there had to be a statue of the Iron Lady: “History demands it”.

Margaret Thatcher will become the first living Prime Minister to have a statue in the Palace of Westminster, though had not the first marble statue [pictured] commissioned been decapitated it would have probably been far sooner.

Sources: The Telegraph, Daily Mail, BBC