"WHY CAN'T WHINGING BLOODY PENSIONERS JUST STOP BLOODY WHINGING?"

In the wake of the "Granny Tax" fallout, Cameron put Tess of the Horribles into the firing line today, to draw some of the flack away from his beloved Gideon.

It seems from what Tess says, that the Tories have come to the conclusion that what the SNP intends to do in Scotland is the right path for them too, just as they did with the council tax freeze. The trouble is that, yet again, it will involve prices going up and more money going to the Treasury.

Now Gideon the Greasy had already pulled a fast one on the price of alcohol this week, having said that there would be ‘no change’. What he meant was that there would be no change from the Labour policy, which meant that the tax would rise by inflation +. So all the people who thought that no change meant no change in the price, were sadly mistaken. 

Tess announced minimum pricing legislation would be introduced to reduce the mayhem to which many English cities are reduced at weekends and to reduce the cost to the NHS in England (and Wales), after all, in a semi privatised health service it might be their chums who would carry some of that cost. It was surely not an extremely unConservative-like meddling in people's lives and lifestyles. 

Meanwhile, whether or not Cameron liked it, the furore over the "granny tax" continued with someone from the Treasury, called Gauke (must be the minister for making the tea or something) said that it was fair, many pensioners would be better off and they had been largely protected from the coalitions deficit reduction.

Unfortunately for him, or rather for Gideon (as probably no one knows who he is), none other than the highly respected Institute for Fiscal Studies sees it differently. They said that 5 million pensioners would be worse off, losing around £350. They criticised Osborne for trying to dress up "what is clearly a tax increase" as a simplification.

 

I suspect that the pensioners who will be better off are the ones who will benefit from the reduction of 5% from the top rate of tax paid on income over £150,000: maybe Michael Cain or Paul Daniels.

Have pensioners been protected? Gideon was at pains to tell us how much the pension would increase in April, seeming to think that the pensioners might have forgotten that this was a legal obligation based on the rate of inflation. 

The truth is that pensioners have suffered very badly from this, (and the last) government's policies. Private pensions have been ruined by Gordon Brown's raid on pension funds, and have tumbled even further as a result of quantitative easing. Low interest rates have turned savings into a depreciating asset, paying low interest and losing value by the day.

 In England cheap travel has been cut, and now the NHS, which older people need more than most of the rest of us, is to be privatised.

Is this the Treasury’s idea of protection? 

From minute one I said that it was a silly mistake to hit pensioners in the same budget as he gave away billions to the rich. Osborne will live to regret it.

SO WHAT IS THE ANSWER?

The other day I was talking to the guy who looks after the changing rooms at my gym. I guess he's in his early 50s, and working in what must be a reasonably low pay job.


I mention this because, in the way you do, without  being particularly interested in the answer, I asked him what he was doing on Hogmanay. 


'Oh nothing much', he replied. 'Time was that you couldn't afford a drink that often, so you splashed out and bought a bottle or two at the New Year, but now that it's a cheap as chips at the supermarket, you can have it all the time. 


'Mind you', he added, 'in these days you could always afford heating. The treat nowadays is to be able to afford to have the whole house warm'.


I thought he was joking, until I got to thinking about it. But it's true that home heating prices are now exorbitant, and the cost of a warm house all winter is one that many working people can no longer afford. At the same time drink has become cheaper.


Someone is bound to have done one of those cost comparisons. You know the kind of thing. It sounds like an arithmetic problem from school: "A man on average wages in 1970 would have had to work 6 hours to be able to buy a bottle of Johnny Walker;  now the same man on the an average wage would only have to work 2 hours. What is the percentage reduction in price, relative to income."


I'd be interested if anyone knows where I could find it.


There has been a lot of criticism of the government's plans to increase the minimum price of a unit of alcohol, and I have been among their critics. I think that no matter what it costs, the compulsive drinker will buy drink. (S)he will find the money somehow. As with any increase in price, it will hit the poorest hardest. The rich are never really hurt by anything. Another £10, £20, £30 on their weekly drink bill will mean nothing. And the teenager out on the batter? A night out is expensive: adding another five or six pounds to it isn't going to stop them.

So, is this the answer? 


The chief medical officers of the UK countries seem to think so, and the Scottish government has already acted to bring in a raft of over 40 measures to tackle a problem that is reckoned to cost around £900 per adult in the country: A total of £3.56 million, around 10% of Scotland's total budget. England looks likely to be following our example.


If Britain has a sever problem with alcohol abuse, Scotland's is much worse. In fact alcohol sales in our country are 23% higher than in England and Wales.


We're not alone in having an alcohol problem, which as well as costing us so much of what we have to run Scotland, also makes our town centres no go areas on Friday and Saturday nights. Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Baltic states and Russia, all have the same issues. Is it the cold, the dark, the short summer? 


There has always been a macho culture about drink in Scotland. 'You're not a man if you can't drink 8 pints', sort of thing. You're a wimp if after a few pints you have an orange juice. And guys have always bragged about how drunk they got and how they had no idea of what they were doing. 


And in the recent past one of the less attractive aspects of sexual equality, has been the sight of teenage girls vomiting in shop doorways or lying drunk in the gutter.


We hear a lot of complaints from bloggers, newspaper columnists, and all, but rarely do we ever hear any really practical solutions put forward.

An effect of cirrhosis of the liver

I for one am sick to death of paying such a large proportion of the block grant to pump stomachs, deal with domestic violence, treat liver cirrhosis and cancer, patch up glassed faces, clean up vomit  etc., ad infinitum.


Has anyone got any constructive suggestions to offer?

NOW THE TORIES BACK MINIMUM PRICING FOR BOOZE

It seems that I am going to have to revise my thinking on the question of Minimum Pricing.

I have always felt that putting the price of the very cheapest alcohol up will not stop people who want to drink or who rather, are determined to drink come what may.

The government in Scotland have been for it and have proposed legislation. The Labour and Tory oppositions in parliament were against it. The Tories (with whom I agreed) suggested that if police used the power they already had that would be sufficient. (Well, I don’t know that it would be sufficient but it would go a long way to clearing up the streets.) The Labour opposition opposed it, because someone said to Iain Gray, “You are in opposition, so you must oppose stuff. OK?” And he blinked and nodded and blinked again and... he opposed, albeit ineffecually.

Last week it became apparent that the Labour Party in England had decided to include a minimum price for alcohol in their manifesto for this year’s election throwing the Scottish Labour position into somewhat embarrassing dubiety.

Now it seems that Ian Duncan Smith says that David Cameron should impose significant increases in taxes on beer, wine and spirits if elected prime minister. In an interview with The Times, the Tory’s social policy supremo accuses the supermarkets of “being as close to immoral as you can get” by selling alcohol so cheaply, and of “creating alcoholics”.

He says that the political parties are “in the grip of cowardice” for failing to advocate a big jump in the cost of alcohol for fear of alienating the voters before the general election. “We are into unpopular territory, but to deal with something like alcohol that is damaging the fabric of the nation we need to raise prices. There is a direct connection between the price of alcohol and consumption.”

With the Medical Officers of Health from both Scotland and England backing this policy, along with the BMA and the Royal College of Physicians not to mention the NHS Federation... and now, the English Labour and Tory parties seeming to come behind it, I think that I’m beginning to be a little outnumbered.

Needless to say, the drink manufacturers and the supermarkets were down on Mr Duncan-Smith like a ton of bricks, claiming that their selling of drink at rock bottom prices has nothing to do with the problem.

I’m going to give some very careful consideration to my views... and I may come back red faced and offer the Scottish Government a full and wholesome apology.

........................

EMBARRASSING POSITION FOR SCOTTISH LABOUR AS BROWN DISREGARDS THEIR POSITION

For some time now it has been the policy of the SNP to tackle the drink problem in Scotland by introducing a system of minimum pricing.

It is not a policy that I agree with for a couple of reasons.

As the Scottish Government has no power to tax, the extra money will simply go to the shops who sell the drink. As Tesco would say "every little bit hurts" and the increase in cost will not put people off buying drink, or at least very few. Those who steal to get drunk will simply steal more; those who take it out of the household budget will spend less on clothes or worse food, in order to afford their drink. For most of the heavy drinkers, drink is a compulsion, an addiction, not a pleasure.

But the arguments for and against have been rehearsed on this forum on numerous occasions and the point of this post is not to repeat them in detail. There is, however, an interesting new development. Labour in Scotland has until now taken the stand that this is a bad idea; that it will penalise moderate drinkers, that it will hurt the drinks industry and that it will antagonise some of their core vote. So today it finds itself in rather a difficult position. It appears, according to the lead story in the Scottish edition of the Daily Telegraph (but not to be found online), that Mr Brown is going to put a minimum price for alcohol into his manifesto for the next Labour government in England.

To be fair to both SNP in Scotland and Mr Brown in England, the Chief Medical Officers from the two countries have backed the policy, as I think, have the BMA, the NHS Federation and the Royal College of Physicians. In light of this Andy Burnham, the English Health Minister has developed a series of policies to bring minimum pricing into effect. They still have to be presented to the Cabinet, where it is said that Mr Mandleson is strongly against them on the basis of them being politically dangerous.

Clearly this puts Mr Gray in an embarrassing position. He is faced with the choice of an embarrassing U-turn or taking a position which is opposed to his English bosses'. It will be interesting to see which one he takes and how many of his already divided shadow cabinet he can take with him.