Alcohol

Gripped by his habitual despair, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend in 1872, ‘I am appalled at the state of society. I’m filled with the sadness that must have affected the Romans of the 4th century. I feel irredeemable barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth.’ Warming to his bleak scatological theme, he continued, ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.’ Many commentators would feel that exactly the same words could be applied to modern Britain. According to the pessimistic narrative of national decline, Britain is now drowning in

Seeing Julie Burchill sitting at the back of the restaurant near Victoria Station, I feel a surge of affection. Chin up, sunglasses on, lips fixed in a pout, she is presenting her usual defiant face to the world. In the past, I’ve always thought of her as being like a screen goddess from Hollywood’s golden age — Marlene Dietrich, for instance. Now, she seems more like a fading Broadway diva and I half expect her to break into a rendition of ‘I’m Still Here’ by Stephen Sondheim. The one-time enfant terrible of Fleet Street is now 53 and lives in Brighton, but she is very much still here. Earlier this year,

John Hayes, the prime minister’s latest tribune, achieved some fame or infamy, depending on your view, when he wrote the following article for the Spectator on 6 August 2005, a month after the 7/7 bombings. I wonder if he still holds these views, and, if he does, whether the prime minister agrees with him? Muslims are right about Britain Many moderate Muslims believe that much of Britain is decadent. They are right. Mr Blair says that the fanatics who want to blow us up despise us, but he won’t admit that their decent co-religionists who are the best hope of undermining the extremists at source — despair of us. They

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_07032013.m4a” title=”Peter Hitchens vs Damian Thompson on whether addiction exists” startat=39] Listen [/audioplayer]The last time I thought about taking heroin was yesterday. I had received ‘an inconvenient truth’ from a beautiful woman. It wasn’t about climate change (I’m not that ecologically switched on). She told me she was pregnant and it wasn’t mine. I had to take immediate action. I put Morrissey on in my car and as I wound my way through the neurotic Hollywood hills my misery burgeoned. Soon I could no longer see where I ended and the pain began. So now I had a choice. I cannot accurately convey the efficiency of heroin in neutralising

James Chapman reports today that plans for a minimum unit price for alcohol are set to be dropped. This is welcome news. The policy always promised to simply drive up the price of drink, penalising all drinkers, while doing little about public drunkenness or binge drinking. The Mail says that the plan has fallen out of favour because of the government’s new emphasis on the cost of living. It is dawning on everyone that that hugely increasing the price of people’s pleasures at a time of falling real incomes is not a sensible political move. Although, the question remains of whether David Cameron will be prepared to fully abandon a

Given the decidedly mixed record of minimum alcohol pricing around the world, why is the government so sure it will work in Britain? The figures it quotes are certainly striking: a 50p unit price will reduce annual alcohol-related mortality by 900, 3,393, “more than 1,000” or “nearly 10,000” a year in England alone. But how solid are they? The Adam Smith Institute did some digging, and found that all of these predictions can be traced back to a computer model designed by a team at Sheffield University. The model has numerous flaws, many of a technical nature, and like all models it is only as good as the data and

Pete posted earlier on the Prime Minister’s latest intervention on the issue of problem drinking. The new proposals — like a greater police presence in A&Es, and ‘drunk tanks’, special units where drunks are taken to sober up — are sensible enough, but seem small relative to the scale of the supposed problem, and focus on peripheral (though important) side-effects, rather than the core of the issue. The ‘big idea’ seems to be missing, even though the Conservatives have been flirting with it for some years, is a minimum unit price (MUP) for alcohol: far more controversial, but potentially far more effective. The last Labour government, in which I was an adviser, looked at this

The Telegraph reports today that the Prime Minister has asked for work to be done across Whitehall on how a minimum price for alcohol could be set. As the paper’s leader column makes clear, this will not be a politically easy thing to do. When I interviewed the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley for the Christmas issue of The Spectator a few weeks back, he was clear about why he didn’t like the concept of a minimum price: ‘I don’t like a minimum price, we are acting against below cost selling. My problem with a minimum price, well I have two problems. One is it’s regressive, so there are perfectly normal

No prizes for guessing who wrote this, or what the drink is: ‘There was very little left of it [in his hipflask] and one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in the cafés, of all the chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of bookshops, and kiosks, and of galleries, and of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of the Butte Chaumont, of Foyet’s old hotel, and of being able to relax and read in the evening, of all the old things he had enjoyed and

Rum is a relatively young drink – 15th century – and still under-appreciated, but at its best can match any whisky or brandy for complexity and sophistication. Peter Grogan enters the darkness A long time ago a knuckle-dragging ancestor of mine left a gourd-ful of palm sugar out in the rain. Trolling along, the right little speck of yeast eventually came to rest in it, causing the sugar to spontaneously ferment. The result probably didn’t taste too good but it had something that helped the day pass in a pleasant blur. Fast-forward 10,000 years — at a guess — and that same something can apparently be had from mixing some