Tax the bland

In the last few weeks I've suffered the following injuries. A paper cut, a bloody nose and a mild but nevertheless rather alarming choking fit.

I'm not happy about it. Not happy at all. As, really, all three could have been easily avoided. Had huge, explicit health-warning labels been attached to a particularly barbed sheet of A4, a firmly struck FIFA-endorsed football and a rather scrumptious yet bony piece of haddock, then I could have avoided being struck over the head by this three-legged stool of misfortune.

I'm speaking metaphorically, of course. I wasn't really whacked over the head with a stool. If I had been, though, I'd hope the Department of Health would have gone to the trouble of sticking a warning label on that too. Something along the lines of: "By all means sit on this stool but don't smack it through someone's skull as it may seriously damage their health."

Last month's news that there may soon be health warnings on alcoholic drinks is as depressing as it is entirely predictable. Depressing because frankly, as a drinking nation, we get what we deserve. After years of making mischief, misbehaving and adopting an immature attitude to alcohol, it's little surprise we're being treated like fools who can't be trusted.

That booze ads have to urge us to "drink responsibly", that similar drinking caveats have to adorn bottles and cans and that TV programmes in which anyone so much as looks at a pint of shandy are swiftly followed by adverts for alcohol helplines and such like is not overkill from a nanny state.

Collectively, we've only ourselves to blame and, let's face it, there's clearly a problem. Pop into any A&E ward on a Saturday night if you're unconvinced. It's booze-fuelled mayhem, so it is.

If you thought that liver cirrhosis was an affliction exclusive to flushed-faced, heavy-drinking middle-aged men, then think again. People as young as 25, some of them women, are now unintentionally getting in on the act. That didn't used to be the case 30 years ago.

So what's changed? Well, drinking is a lot, lot easier than it used to be. If you're a 20-year-old man who's lucky enough to have a granny who's still alive, chances are she's a more masculine drinker than you are. OK, 10 pints may be beyond her but, while you're sinking sweet bottle after sweet bottle of WKD, she's probably taking on a whisky or a brandy. Straight. In a big glass.

She drinks like a man. In comparison, the average 18 to 25-year-old is a drinking wimp who wouldn't know the taste of alcohol if it came up and hit him over the head with the aforementioned bar stool.

Learning to drink, and heaven knows it's something that should be taught, was once a face-contorting initiation to the unfamiliar, ill-omened flavours and aromas of alcohol. It was an uphill sipping slog, a grudging grind through the gears of bitterness and sharpness and a rite of passage that would hopefully stand one in good stead.

For today's generation, however, it's a relative stroll in the park. By actively removing any remnants of alcohol character from their products, drinks companies have also removed any subconscious safety net. Beer is served so cold it tastes like water, cider has to come diluted over ice, and the alcohol in ready-to-drink concepts is so smothered in sugar that you could drink them with your cornflakes in the morning. It's little surprise that vodka, the most tasteless and flavourless spirit on the back-bar, is also the most popular. There are 25-year-old men who find a pint of cask ale too bitter. That would have been fighting talk 20 years ago.

So instead of whacking ludicrous warning labels on drinks that will only serve to heighten alcohol's air of mystique among whippersnappers, how about the government adopting a more novel approach? Namely, the banning (or at least heavy taxing) of alcoholic drinks that don't challenge the tastebuds? Yes, a flavour-based tax threshold is what I'm suggesting.

The benefits of this would be twofold. Firstly, it would spell the end for some seriously rubbish drinks - you know who you are! Secondly, and more importantly, it would make excessive drinking much less appealing to impressionable young drinkers.

Instead of getting drunk in a bus shelter, they'll go and kick a ball around, read a book or, in the worst-case scenario, introduce their lips to a horizon-broadening, character-building and gorgeously hoppy pint of Timothy Taylor's Landlord. Nothing wrong with that, sonny. "That's my boy!"

So, in summary: a reduction in quantity and an improvement in quality. Two birds have been seen off with just one stone there and, what's more, it's an idea perfectly in tune with Tony's utopian vision of a continental café culture. Sorted.