Westminster world's no joke
Fuzzy thinking. Rambling incoherent statements. Total amnesia. Blurred vision. Have our friends at the Home Office and DCMS been binge drinking? It would certainly seem so from what they spewed up late last week.
Never can there have been such a dog's breakfast of proposals set before the public. Never can there have been such an intellectually vacuous quarter-baked set of "ideas" purporting to be "policy" as the Government offered on Friday as its solution to binge drinking. There is nothing in the proposals that will make a jot of difference. And they inspire no confidence that a period of consultation will deliver anything better.
The greatest gap in Government "thinking" lies in its failure to recognise the contribution of supermarkets and off-licences to public drunkenness and disorder. How can businesses selling nearly half the nation's alcohol, at nearly half the price in pubs, escape so lightly?
To be fair, Tessa Jowell has drawn attention to the "pre-loading" phenomenon we all know about young people tanking up before they hit the pubs. But a fat lot of good her brilliant insight has done. Until the off-trade is properly engaged in this debate, there's little pubs and bars can do to stop drunken youth despoiling our city centres.
It is, I'm afraid, another example of the power of superior lobbying. Supermarkets are past masters at keeping politicians sweet. We, sadly, are not. Credit is due to the BBPA and ALMR for explaining convincingly why a blanket industry-levy on the polluter-pays basis was so wrong. But the thin end of the wedge of that principle is clearly showing and looks likely to widen. BEDA, the night-club lobby group, on the other hand, has played a blinder. Not only has it got the hefty PEL monkey off its back, it also seems to have escaped from being asked to cough up for town-centre trouble. As long as its members can say their clubs are not "primarily for drinking" (because they sell food and people dance) they are immunised against fines.
It's a very funny world in Westminster, but no one in the pub trade is laughing.
