You may recall that a couple of weeks ago Buckfast Tonic Wine was fingered as being a major cause of violence in Strathclyde, Scotland. I thought I had dealt with these hollow accusations quite well, but it seems that the monks who brew this euphemistic wine are now standing up for themselves.
They make some very good points, some of which I covered…
The BBC reports that a bunch of neo-prohibitionists are complaining that a Welsh language festival is planning to start serving alcohol.
Selling alcohol (with food) seems a good idea at a mass festival, you’d have thought, but the Welsh council for alcohol and other drugs are, quite unsurprisingly, bitching at this reasonable move…
The neo-prohibitionist’s favoured uncritical press-release reporter, the BBC News website, tells us we are drinking less. The amount of people buying alcohol from an off-license in the past year has dropped from 37% in 1998 to 27% in 2009 and we are drinking less in pubs and bars…
Whilst I would certainly agree that teenagers should not drink to excess, this piece of scare-mongering propaganda in the Telegraph can be neatly summed up by two quotes (one by an arch neo-prohibitionist) it contains:
We’ve seeing (sic) a slight decline in the number of children who drink – Don Shenker, total arse and Chief Executive of pseudo-charity Alcohol Concern
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I mentioned the article on Velvet Glove, Iron Fist about the real history of binge-drinking in a tweet earlier. It is well worth reading, lots of interesting data there, and good criticism of the BBC News website’s latest bit of anti-drink propaganda…
The BBC, favourite news outlet of the neo-prohibitionists thanks to its relentlessly uncritical reporting, has an article on the new code of conduct that will be introduced for pubs later this year. It contains the usual dodgy statistics and quotes from self-serving moral guardians (including pronouncements from the odious arse Don Shenker), but let us look at the guidelines that the BBC mentions:
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I Tweeted about the ‘terrible’ problems that Buckfast Tonic Wine (and it is really wine in a euphemistic sense) seems to be causing in Scotland as reported on the BBC News website a bit earlier and in a documentary on BBC Scotland to be broadcast later today…
There is another story on the BBC News website trying to scare Scottish people into drinking less alcohol and accept pointless restrictions on their liberty when it comes to alcohol pricing and availability.
One of the things that vexed me about the article was that it says the average Scots drinker over the age of 18 drinks 26.5 units a week, more than the recommended 21 units…
My Tweets have mentioned Pete Brown’s excellent series of articles which demolish a lot of lies told by those who wish to brow-beat us into not drinking. I thought they were so good and worth reading that I’d write a quick blog post to praise them more fully and hopefully bring them to the attention of a few more people.
It is very easy to fall for some…
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