Even if you accept that the government’s plans for a minimum alcohol price in England and Wales are well-intentioned you can be pretty sure that it’s a bad idea. How so? Well, the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats each agree that something must be done and this kind of cross-party agreement tends to be a healthy indicator there’s bipartisan foolishness afoot.
Alcohol consumption is a complicated phenomenon and the price of drink is only one factor in a story that saw booze consumption fall for decades, rise again towards Victorian levels and then, in the past decade, actually begin to fall again. So is this legislation even necessary? The Prime Minister claims that introducing a minimum price of 40p per unit will “save” 900 lives a year and, somehow, cut crime by some 50,000 incidents. One assumes these figures were plucked from a tombola.
More to the point, a government elected on a promise to reduce state-sponsored micro-management shows itself just as happy to interfere anywhere, anytime as its predecessor.
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