Taxing Alcohol
It’s just pointless and stupid. Taxing alcohol won’t reduce the amount of people who drink or the number of drinks they have. Cigarette tax was been raised constantly, yet the number of smokers didn’t drop off because of it. Putting a higher amount of tax on alcohol won’t stop anyone drinking. It wouldn’t stop me, for one. Those who want to drink will continue to do so unless the tax hike is absolutely huge - and a tax increase of that size would be electoral suicide.
As it is, we already have the second highest rate of tax on alcohol in Europe! As if paying a bit more will actually prevent people from buying it! All it will do is mean that people readjust their expenditures to spend less on other things.
24-hour drinking is the best law passed by Labour in the past decade. We are not at the stage of having a “continental style” drinking culture, and that is primarily because they won’t let us. 24-hour drinking is still an urban myth. Few places have a licence to do so, let alone actually do so on a regular basis. Most pubs still close at 11pm, so even so technically 24-hour drinking is possible, in reality it isn’t, and there has been no change. How is our drinking culture supposed to change if the opportunity to do so is not there? Even if it was, you couldn’t expect it to go through a metamorphosis overnight. It takes time for cultural change to happen - several years, if not more. It’s only been two since the law was passed - and it hasn’t exactly been fully implemented since then, either.
Doctors who claim that there should be more tax etc. on should, if you pardon the crudity, just fuck off. Your job is to fix us after we make ourselves ill. You can tell us that we can make ourselves ill through drinking too much, but then shut the hell up. We are adults and can make our own decisions about our own bodies. If we want to drink, we will. Advise us how much we should limit ourselves to - and make it better than a guess - then shut up and be there to fix us when we’re ill. That’s your job, not to police what we do and demand that we don’t do anything that might make us ill.
Very simply, taxing alcohol is never going to stop people from drinking, or even make them cut down. To suggest that it will is to ignore human nature.
Sources: BBC, The Telegraph, The Guardian
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Re: “ Taxing alcohol won’t reduce the amount of people who drink or the number of drinks they have”
They know that. They know it never has to date and probably never will - But they also know it will increase revenue…
You can’t even trust their figures and claims that it is actually a problem.
You’ve captured my own thoughts on this subject with absolute precision.
Iam a grown man and I’ll continue to drink what and when I want; not what some politicised medic who has stuck a finger in the air has guessed might be good (or not) for me.