Just lay off the booze – price, that is (From The Northern Echo)

Just lay off the booze – price, that is

10:57am Tuesday 2nd February 2010 in

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I DON’T think I contribute greatly to Britain’s problem with alcohol. I do like a drink, though, and, like anyone else who drinks regularly, I confess I sometimes have a glass too many.

However, on those odd occasions when I do get that extra little drop down my neck, I don’t rush out into the street half-naked, shouting and bawling and looking for a doorway in which to urinate or fornicate. I just fall asleep in front of the telly, and the next thing I know, my wife is waking me up to tell me it’s bedtime.

I deplore the extortionate control-freakery on the part of the British Medical Association (BMA) and certain MPs who want greatly to increase the price of alcohol. There is more than a touch of irony in the BMA’s position – because everyone knows that the definition of a man who drinks too much is one who drinks more than his doctor.

But the moral point is that we should not punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty: putting up the price of booze penalises not only the drunken yob turning our town centre into a hellhole every weekend or the binge-drinker paralytic in A&E, but the unemployed bloke who struggles to afford the occasional pint and the pensioner who likes a drop of sherry in the evening.

Besides, who would benefit from the price increase? Why, the drinks manufacturers and the Inland Revenue. What a swindle is being proposed here.

We need to remind ourselves what alcohol is. It is not just a chemical substance. It is an historic social lubricant which most civilisations have concocted over thousands of years. The Bible speaks of “wine that maketh glad the heart of man”. At this point, the killjoys and control-freaks rush to tell us it also causes a great deal of misery.

The reply to this is to say that most things invented by the mind of man have the capacity to cause us trouble. But we don’t ban cars simply because there are road accidents.

When I was a schoolteacher I had to look after a young varmint who was sick all over the place because he’d eaten six Mars bars.

The right response would not have been to overprice sweets, but to teach moderation.

To mention booze as a social lubricant takes us straight to the pub, so to speak. Like the village church, the local pub has been one of the building blocks of community life for centuries. Now, largely owing to the Government’s puritanical disapproval of drink, 50 pubs are closing every week. This is causing massive deterioration in the quality of community life, and especially village life. As most of the politicians and officials who govern us are metropolitan apparatchiks, they don’t care about this in the slightest.

There is worse. Tim Martin, chairman of Wetherspoons, wrote recently in his house magazine that the police are going in for entrapment, actually paying underage kids to go into pubs and ask for drink – in the hope of making the landlord lose his licence.

This is a very serious allegation and, if true, it means that law and order officers in England are operating like the secret police in one of the former totalitarian states.

What I crave – and no, it’s not yet another glass – is for us to be treated like grown-up people. As things are, almost every aspect of our lives comes under some sort of scrutiny and regulation. For goodness sake, leave us alone.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.