Tax, tax and more tax. This seems to be the government’s method in trying to control social behaviour, and I for one like many can see right through it. Patricia Hewitt’s latest idea is to add extra tax on alcopops to try and curb teenage binge drinking. What planet is this woman from? If you charge £100 for a Bacardi Breezer or a WKD, then the kids are just going to switch to something else cheaper. Even if you increase all booze by a more moderate amount, people will still buy it, or just get it from France (like I do for my wine!). The rich kids will still be able to get tanked up, and the poor kids will just find alternatives to intoxicate themselves, or just bleed their credit cards even drier.
All this policy will result in is more money for the government’s coffers, and not the slightest improvement in the binge drinking and weekend town centre puke-fests we now have. But I can’t believe Hewitt doesn’t already know this. She must do. It is just another tax increase hidden behind another current scare (whether real or imagined) we should be all concerned about, alongside the environment and terrorism. She doesn’t give a fig about kids smashing up town centres, all she cares about is getting money for Tony’s wars.
So how do we solve the binge drinking problem? OK, I can’t claim to have all the answers, but I know it isn’t tax…
If we look at the southern European countries, they don’t have such problems despite having far cheaper booze, which is easier to buy and bars open far longer hours. Alcohol isn’t treated as some forbidden fruit which you can only have a particular age. There’s no feeling of the rites of passage into adulthold that it has over here. It isn’t considered as something that grown-ups have and kids don’t. Youngsters are gradually introduced via glasses of wine over meals, so it doesn’t feel unusual to them. So they never feel the need to sneak off and try it out with their friends. In fact, in this country, some youngsters are often brought up this way and they usually don’t end up as the hardened boozers. A more mature approach is needed by adults.
So why do people need to drink themselves into oblivion at weekends? I think the clue is in that last word: weekend. After a week of work people want to escape from it, and getting pissed is the easy outlet. People in the UK work longer hours with fewer holidays than anywhere else in Europe, it’s no wonder they need to let off steam at the weekend. If we improved working conditions and hours, hopefully people would not feel so damn depressed and stressed out to need to drink it off.
We are still a very reserved society by nature, where striking up a converstion with a stranger is very difficult. Alcohol is a great builder of confidence and a breaker down of inhibitions. By getting a bit tipsy it allows us to approach others with some belief we might get somewhere with them. When you’re young and virile, you’re desperate to meet new people for a bit of slap-and-tickle, so the bit of booze helps the cause. I’ve overheard people say things like “She doesn’t drink, so I’ll never stand a chance of sleeping with her”, which implies the only way of getting a girl is if she’s drunk enough to sleep with you. We need some way of breaking down this reserve and start to demistify strangers. Why can’t we just go up to someone we’ve never met before and talk to them in a friendly manner? Is it because we all consider strangers as potentially dangerous? How mad is that? Maybe if bars turned the music down a bit, people might get to know each other more. But I think this culture of friendliness needs to be promoted more in the home, schools and in the media.
Last of all, it’s the old problem of peer pressure. If all you mates are drinking, you have to too. Woe betide anyone who can’t keep up. You don’t want to be the lightweight who drinks the least. Peer pressure will always exists amongst young people, it’s part of their growing up and defining themselves. How we break that particular cycle I’m not sure. Maybe other things to do for young people apart from drinking. In the old days, young men just got sent to war. Now maybe that’s what Tony’s got in mind all along…
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