The budget approaches us soon, and the Mr Darling will be rising tax on alcohol once again. Upon hearing that there is likely to be between twenty and thirty pence per bottle rise on wine, I thought I would post this article. I wrote it last year and posted it on the first edition of The Tasting Note, and just thought it might be appropriate as I believe he is going to use the excuse of 'curbing binge drinking' to raise taxes for us all.
Originally posted August 2007
Sylvester Stallone needed a licence to mate with Sandra Bullock. In the movie ‘Demolition Man’, Stallone’s character gets frozen and woken up in the 2032 where every aspect of your life is controlled. You can’t have children without state approval, and anything that is bad for you has been banned. You are not allowed to drink alcohol, eat meat or swear, and after visiting the toilet you use three seashells instead of toilet paper. And while 2032 may be a quarter of a century away, but it would appear that there are plans afoot to move towards a society like that shown in the movie.
The Scottish Parliament has tabled plans to ban discounting of alcohol in shops, in an attempt to curb binge drinking. All price cuts that encourage buying more than one item, or anything that gives ‘free’ alcohol to the customer will be illegal. Therefore any ‘Buy One Get One Free’ (or BOGOF) deals, 2 for £10 or 3 for the price of 2 deals will be done away with. And it will achieve sod all.
The Threshers Group, which includes the Threshers, Bottoms Up and Victoria Wine shops, have structured their entire business plan centre around a 3 for the price of 2 promotion. All their single bottle prices are stupidly expensive so that they still make a nice profit margin when they give the third bottle away. Then you have whisky retailers who also do heavy discounts or multibuy deals. Around Christmas time, most whisky specialists will knock £5 off leading brands like Glenmorangie or Macallan, which can be up to 20% of the normal retail price. Oddbins has, for many years, run a ‘Buy 2, Save £10’ promotion over the festive period on a range of malt whiskies.These promotions are now frowned upon because they are encouraging people to buy extra products, which, according to the geniuses running Holyrood, will lead the customer to down two bottles of whisky in half an hour and the go out and vomit on someone’s doorstep.
The problem isn’t even the supermarkets doing huge beer discounts. Most specialist off licenses can’t compete with the supermarket ‘beer by the case’ price. In fact, most wholesalers can’t compete with the supermarkets price on beer. Cases of 24 bottles of Stella for £10 are not uncommon, and for supermarket own brands, you can be looking at as little as 35 to 40 pence per pint! And while a half a dozen guys might meet up to watch a football match and go through a few of cases of beer that they bought from Tesco, and they may get mullered, this is not binge drinking. Yes, it is getting too drunk, too quickly, and certainly isn’t good for your health, but this isn’t the sort of drinking that the SNP are wanting to prevent.
There are many people who will think I’m talking piffle. And I will call them a blind, liberal pillock, who is trying to group all of society’s alcohol problems into one. The people who buy bulk and benefit from multibuys and then drink wine, spirits and beer to excess at home are either having a dinner party, having friends round for an evening of sports or movies. or are alcoholics. With the exception of the alcoholics (which is something that should be addressed in a different article), very few of these people are having these evenings more than once a week, and while this may lead to drinking to excess, it is certainly not binge drinking.
Binge drinkers get drunk by consuming non discounted spirits and the drinking in pubs and clubs. A bottle of Glen’s vodka, at under £10 at full retail price, drunk by three 19 year olds in their bedroom before meeting up with their friends at a pub and drinking spirits, pints and alcopops all evening – that is binge drinking. And the even bigger problem is that they are doing this numerous times each week. And not a single thing that they are drinking is discounted. Not a single thing is from a multibuy deal.
I spoke to a gentleman who runs a pub and will remain nameless, who put the blame for binge
drinking firmly on the doorstep of the retail trade. He said that “it’s the kids who raid their parents drinks cupboard and steal half a dozen cans of Tennents that is the problem”. No it’s not! It’s the two hundred people in his bar every Friday and Saturday night, getting wrecked on cocktails and beer that are not discounted that is fuelling the binge drinking culture. It is those same customers who are staggering home, vomiting on doorsteps and getting into fights. It is those customers that the SNP are trying to ‘make healthy’.
Neither cheap vodka nor the pubs are causing people to binge drink, they are just method by which they achieve their inebriation. The reason that people start binge drinking is because they want to get drunk. Yes, I have got smashed before, but it was more of a by-product of me seeing my friends or having dinner with people and me drinking too much. I didn’t, and never have, set out with the aim on getting drunk, it just sort of happened! The majority of younger people nowadays however, have one goal and that is to lose all control of their brains and get totally drunk, and it because, in Britain, children are not exposed to alcohol in a positive way.
Take the Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese… hell, even the sausage wielding Germans. Alcoholic drinks are part of their culture, and children are introduced to wine or beer at the dinner table. Even if they do not try the liquid, children see their parents drinking it in moderation and alcohol is viewed as a positive thing. French people have wine in their blood and on their table, and the Germans celebrate with beer whilst wearing leather shorts and playing ‘oompah’ music on trombones. In Britain however, alcohol is seen as something that adults drink, in pubs away from children or, which is even worse, as a form of entertainment in their own homes in front of their children.
Parents will routinely refuse their children a glass of wine, because it contains alcohol, yet will happily pour Cola down their child’s neck. And lets face it, of these two drinks, on a glass by glass basis the wine is a hell of a lot better for your health than the Cola is. A lot of parents will all to often allow their children to see them drunk, making fools out of themselves which is reinforcing the view that there is nothing wrong with getting absolutely smashed for the sake of getting smashed. With all this going on, is it any wonder that our young go out and get drunk several times each week? They either don’t know any difference or want to experience the alien world that is ‘the pub’.
So should we be encouraging our children to have a glass of watered down wine with a meal? Should we be taking our children into pubs and offering them weak shandy? Well not if we don’t want every single child protection agency breathing down our necks and the government saying that we are contributing to the breakdown in society. They will say that education is the way forward, and it is, but the education that will be given will be of the “alcohol is nice in moderation, but YOU MUST NOT GET DRUNK – EVER”, and as soon as that child can get into a pub, they will and they will get obliterated on Blue WKD.
If education is to work, it isn’t the kids we should be teaching, it’s the parents. They should be taught to allow their children to try wine mixed with water or beer mixed with lemonade. They should be taught to not get drunk in front of their children as it will have a negative effect on their children. They should be taught to spend time with their children, engage them and not plonk them in front of the TV with films to watch whilst mum or dad gets blitzed on the sofa with their pals. They should be taught to be good parents!
But it is a lot easier for a government to go along the “blame the industry and/or raise taxes” route rather than actually address the problem, which is, of course, “Education, Education, Education”. Now where have I heard those words before?
Originally posted August 2007
Sylvester Stallone needed a licence to mate with Sandra Bullock. In the movie ‘Demolition Man’, Stallone’s character gets frozen and woken up in the 2032 where every aspect of your life is controlled. You can’t have children without state approval, and anything that is bad for you has been banned. You are not allowed to drink alcohol, eat meat or swear, and after visiting the toilet you use three seashells instead of toilet paper. And while 2032 may be a quarter of a century away, but it would appear that there are plans afoot to move towards a society like that shown in the movie.
The Scottish Parliament has tabled plans to ban discounting of alcohol in shops, in an attempt to curb binge drinking. All price cuts that encourage buying more than one item, or anything that gives ‘free’ alcohol to the customer will be illegal. Therefore any ‘Buy One Get One Free’ (or BOGOF) deals, 2 for £10 or 3 for the price of 2 deals will be done away with. And it will achieve sod all.
The Threshers Group, which includes the Threshers, Bottoms Up and Victoria Wine shops, have structured their entire business plan centre around a 3 for the price of 2 promotion. All their single bottle prices are stupidly expensive so that they still make a nice profit margin when they give the third bottle away. Then you have whisky retailers who also do heavy discounts or multibuy deals. Around Christmas time, most whisky specialists will knock £5 off leading brands like Glenmorangie or Macallan, which can be up to 20% of the normal retail price. Oddbins has, for many years, run a ‘Buy 2, Save £10’ promotion over the festive period on a range of malt whiskies.These promotions are now frowned upon because they are encouraging people to buy extra products, which, according to the geniuses running Holyrood, will lead the customer to down two bottles of whisky in half an hour and the go out and vomit on someone’s doorstep.
The problem isn’t even the supermarkets doing huge beer discounts. Most specialist off licenses can’t compete with the supermarket ‘beer by the case’ price. In fact, most wholesalers can’t compete with the supermarkets price on beer. Cases of 24 bottles of Stella for £10 are not uncommon, and for supermarket own brands, you can be looking at as little as 35 to 40 pence per pint! And while a half a dozen guys might meet up to watch a football match and go through a few of cases of beer that they bought from Tesco, and they may get mullered, this is not binge drinking. Yes, it is getting too drunk, too quickly, and certainly isn’t good for your health, but this isn’t the sort of drinking that the SNP are wanting to prevent.
There are many people who will think I’m talking piffle. And I will call them a blind, liberal pillock, who is trying to group all of society’s alcohol problems into one. The people who buy bulk and benefit from multibuys and then drink wine, spirits and beer to excess at home are either having a dinner party, having friends round for an evening of sports or movies. or are alcoholics. With the exception of the alcoholics (which is something that should be addressed in a different article), very few of these people are having these evenings more than once a week, and while this may lead to drinking to excess, it is certainly not binge drinking.
Binge drinkers get drunk by consuming non discounted spirits and the drinking in pubs and clubs. A bottle of Glen’s vodka, at under £10 at full retail price, drunk by three 19 year olds in their bedroom before meeting up with their friends at a pub and drinking spirits, pints and alcopops all evening – that is binge drinking. And the even bigger problem is that they are doing this numerous times each week. And not a single thing that they are drinking is discounted. Not a single thing is from a multibuy deal.
I spoke to a gentleman who runs a pub and will remain nameless, who put the blame for binge
drinking firmly on the doorstep of the retail trade. He said that “it’s the kids who raid their parents drinks cupboard and steal half a dozen cans of Tennents that is the problem”. No it’s not! It’s the two hundred people in his bar every Friday and Saturday night, getting wrecked on cocktails and beer that are not discounted that is fuelling the binge drinking culture. It is those same customers who are staggering home, vomiting on doorsteps and getting into fights. It is those customers that the SNP are trying to ‘make healthy’.Neither cheap vodka nor the pubs are causing people to binge drink, they are just method by which they achieve their inebriation. The reason that people start binge drinking is because they want to get drunk. Yes, I have got smashed before, but it was more of a by-product of me seeing my friends or having dinner with people and me drinking too much. I didn’t, and never have, set out with the aim on getting drunk, it just sort of happened! The majority of younger people nowadays however, have one goal and that is to lose all control of their brains and get totally drunk, and it because, in Britain, children are not exposed to alcohol in a positive way.
Take the Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese… hell, even the sausage wielding Germans. Alcoholic drinks are part of their culture, and children are introduced to wine or beer at the dinner table. Even if they do not try the liquid, children see their parents drinking it in moderation and alcohol is viewed as a positive thing. French people have wine in their blood and on their table, and the Germans celebrate with beer whilst wearing leather shorts and playing ‘oompah’ music on trombones. In Britain however, alcohol is seen as something that adults drink, in pubs away from children or, which is even worse, as a form of entertainment in their own homes in front of their children.
Parents will routinely refuse their children a glass of wine, because it contains alcohol, yet will happily pour Cola down their child’s neck. And lets face it, of these two drinks, on a glass by glass basis the wine is a hell of a lot better for your health than the Cola is. A lot of parents will all to often allow their children to see them drunk, making fools out of themselves which is reinforcing the view that there is nothing wrong with getting absolutely smashed for the sake of getting smashed. With all this going on, is it any wonder that our young go out and get drunk several times each week? They either don’t know any difference or want to experience the alien world that is ‘the pub’.
So should we be encouraging our children to have a glass of watered down wine with a meal? Should we be taking our children into pubs and offering them weak shandy? Well not if we don’t want every single child protection agency breathing down our necks and the government saying that we are contributing to the breakdown in society. They will say that education is the way forward, and it is, but the education that will be given will be of the “alcohol is nice in moderation, but YOU MUST NOT GET DRUNK – EVER”, and as soon as that child can get into a pub, they will and they will get obliterated on Blue WKD.
If education is to work, it isn’t the kids we should be teaching, it’s the parents. They should be taught to allow their children to try wine mixed with water or beer mixed with lemonade. They should be taught to not get drunk in front of their children as it will have a negative effect on their children. They should be taught to spend time with their children, engage them and not plonk them in front of the TV with films to watch whilst mum or dad gets blitzed on the sofa with their pals. They should be taught to be good parents!
But it is a lot easier for a government to go along the “blame the industry and/or raise taxes” route rather than actually address the problem, which is, of course, “Education, Education, Education”. Now where have I heard those words before?
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