A few days ago the Heresy Corner blog wrote a piece exposing the worrying tendency of officialdom and do-gooders to slam down hard on things they don’t like (eg. smoking, alcohol) but with completely the wrong timing and emphasis. The writer shows that they did it with smoking and now they’re doing it with alcohol, and suggests that it is little more then self-defeating persecution. Consider the following extracts …

Alcohol consumption in the UK in fact peaked in 2004 and has been declining ever since. It’s now 11% lower than it was. There was an especially large fall in 2009. The UK ranks also below the European average in terms of consumption, an under-reported fact that may have something to do with Britain’s having the second-highest level of alcohol duty in the EU. The fall in consumption has been most dramatic among young people (the same is true of smoking) as a combination of draconian ID-checks (these days, you’re lucky to be sold a bottle of wine no questions asked if you’re under 40), rising prices and a media obsession with teenage drunkenness has made the traditional slow transition to the adult world of social drinking far more difficult to accomplish. This, of course, may help to explain why, when they finally are allowed to drink, so many young people seem unable to handle it.

As the harm reduces, so the zeal of the harm-reducers increases, as they focus all their energy and determination on ever-smaller numbers of the recalcitrant. At the same time, new targets come into their sights.

Two media organisations in particular enjoy scaring their audience with exaggerated levels of gloom. The Daily Mail and the BBC […] It’s not just alcohol and tobacco that regularly get this level of alarmist coverage. It’s also… illegal drugs, obesity, sex-trafficking, climate change, internet porn and the “sexualisation of childhood”.

Nanny statism, of course, is what happens when the government takes the regulation of morality away from bishops and gives it to doctors, social workers and professional experts.

I would actually say that this is what happens when you take the regulation of morality away from the people themselves. What happened to the personal responsibility that this government is supposedly such a believer in?

What is just as worrying, as is pointed out by Tim Worstall at Forbes is that the numbers upon which this alcohol policy are being built are themselves a complete fiction. As Worstall points out …

[W]hat drives political action is not the truth but what people believe to be the truth. So, if you can whip up a scare story about the ill effects […] then, as long as people believe you, you should be able to get some action taken […]

“Some 1,173,386 people in England were admitted to casualty for injuries or illnesses caused by drinking in 2010/11, compared with just 510,780 in 2002/3 […] The figures for last year represent an 11 per cent increase on the previous 12 months, when alcohol-related admissions stood at 1,056,962”

[…] there are two things odd about these numbers […] The first is that no one at all is measuring how many hospital admissions are as a result of alcohol. That’s just not what is done:

“It’s largely a function of methodology. Alcohol-related admissions are calculated in such a way that if you are unlucky enough, say, to be involved in a fire and admitted to hospital for the treatment of your burns, it will count as 0.38 of an alcohol-related admission — unless you happen to be under 15, when it won’t count at all.

“If you drown, it counts as 0.34 of an alcohol-related admission […] Getting chilled to the bone (accidental excessive cold) counts for 0.25 of an admission, intentional self-harm to 0.20 per cent of an admission.

“These fractions apply whether or not there was any evidence you had been drinking before these disasters befell you.”

So […] [w]e’re not in fact being told anything at all about the number of alcohol related hospital admissions. We’re being told about the numbers which are assumed to be alcohol related. And I think we can all see what the problem is here, can’t we? […]

Now, does all of this mean that there has been no rise in alcohol related diseases? I’ve no idea actually, but the point is that nor do you and nor do the people releasing these figures to us. The methods they’re using to compile the numbers, the things they’re not telling us about those numbers, mean that they lying to us with those numbers.

So basically the whole thing is a complete and utter lie from start to finish, and the numbers could be adjusted in the background to prove anything anyone wants. And politicians wonder why no-one believes nor trusts them. Would you?

So wither next? You’d better believe that these state-registered nanny do-gooders have their sights on all the “problem areas” mentioned above. Drugs have been a target for a long time; the heavy-handed mobsters must arrive soon. They’ve started on obesity already. And as for anything to do with sex, well we must ban that because, well, it’s just not nice is it?

Next we know they’ll be wanting to grant us licences to shag. Oh wait a minute. We have those already, it’s called marriage. It’s probably as well no-one takes blind bit of notice of that any more.

So be alert … your country needs lerts! Gawdelpus!