An alert reader (be a lert, your blog needs lerts!) sent me this:

According to Margaret Rhodes, the Queen’s cousin, HM’s alcohol intake never varies. She takes a gin and Dubonnet before lunch, with a slice of lemon and a lot of ice. She will take wine with lunch and a dry Martini and a glass of champagne in the evening. That comes to six units a day, which would make Her Majesty a binge drinker by Government standards.

Could be more than 6 units, depends on the heavy or not hand there. And I will admit that I prefer not the lunch part. Same consumption, a cocktail, some wine, perhaps a cognac or a port after dinner. 6-8 units a day…..8-10 with that hand.

HM is 88…clearly booze kills….

Prime Minister David Cameron is known to have sympathy with the idea of minimum pricing, which medics say could save nearly 10,000 lives per year if set at 50p per unit.

Gosh, that’s amazing.

Alcohol related deaths in the UK rose to 9,031 in 2008, up from 8,724 the previous year.

Rilly? A slight rise in the cost of cheap booze will save more lives per year than are lost to all booze?

Hey, why not put it up to £50 a unit and we’ll all live forever?

Forgive me the crudity but I’ve really had it with cunts lying to get their bandwagons rolling.

Well, yes, it’s not booze related injuries, not A&E and it’s most certainly not patients. It’s admissions.

The number of NHS patients who have to undergo emergency readmission to hospital within a month of being discharged has increased by more than three quarters in the last decade, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Now, the NHS sending people away and then bringing them back in, this might actually be a very good idea. Hospitals are,. afer all, very dangerous places and doctors, nurses, hospital and medical treatment (so called “iatrogenic” causes) one of the leading causes of death.

But leave that aside and consider just the idea that we’ve these more readmissions. That makes the number of admissions for alcohol related diseases go up. Because we are not counting “came in glassed having got boozed up”, we’re counting “came in for this, that’s 0.3 of an alcohol related admission”.

And note that in our booze related admission figures we are not told that the portion of all admissions has gone up. No, we’re told that the actual number has gone up. Without being told that readmissions are up 75%, that total admissions are up 40%.

We’re being lied to in short. The bastards.

Researchers found people who live rough are likely to die more than 30 years earlier than the average British person.

According to new figures homeless people will die in their 40s – men on average at 47 while women have a life expectancy of 43.

Each year, alcohol causes the admission of over a million people to hospital,

No, it does not. The measurement is actually the number of admissions, not the number of people admitted. Let us assume that we’ve got an alcoholic, one who tumbles over regularly when pissed. How many admissions will he have in a year?

Quite.

Oh, and it’s not admissions caused by alcohol either. It is the number of admissions which we asssume are related to alcohol, 0.3 of a hypertensive disorder admission and so on.

No  one, no one at all, is actually counting the number of admissions caused by alcohol.

So, from the second sentence, we know you’re lying bastards.

In 2010, alcohol was 44 per cent more affordable than it was in 1980,

So are jeans, phone calls and bread. What you’ve shown there is that the country has got richer. Hurrah!

There is a push towards a minimum price for each unit of alcohol in the devolved nations of the United Kingdom, with the SNP leading the debate in Scotland. This is a simple and effective mechanism for the Scottish Government to control alcohol prices.

That’s a particularly stupid method as all it does is boost the profit margins of the alcohol makers. Oh, as well as being illegal under EU law.

With alcohol harm costing us an estimated £25 billion each year, MPs must act now.

And what a delightfully made up number. However, as has been pointed out many times before, there are costs and benefits to all things. People drink because they like it, the pleasure of the booze is worth the pain purchasing it brings on in the wallet. Thus the value to the populace of booze must be higher than what the populace spends on booze. Over£50 billion then.

We get twice as much out of booze as booze gets out of us, even by your absurd and inflated figure.

So you can bugger offn’all, you puritan prodnoses.

Still, every now and then one comes across a mercifully practical piece of parenting wisdom. The Australian psychologist Steve Biddulph recommends that, as soon as both parents arrive home from work, they should sit down together with a stiff drink. The alcohol, he says, will make them more relaxed – and thus better parents.

You give the gin to the screaming child.

Just make sure you’ve still got gripe water* in the house: wouldn’t want the child protection people coming around.

*Gripe water is essentially booze and sugar. An alcopop in fact which is why kiddies like it so much.

The costs to our economy of productivity lost at work, together with the criminal justice and health bill, put the financial drain as high as £55bn. There is no such thing as a cheap drink; we are all paying a very heavy price.

Sigh. Leave aside that this is simply an invented number (only two years ago it was around £20 billion).

What is the benefit of booze? The pleasure that people get from boozing of course. How can we measure the value, in cold hard cash, of that benefit, that pleasure?

The amount that people spend on booze of course. No one who thinks that 50p in their pocket is more valuable than a pint of cheap cider will exchange the 50p for the pint of cheap cider. Thus the pint of cheap cider which people do exchange 50p for must be worth more to that person than 50p.

The value to, the pleasure gained from, the boozer of booze must be greater than the amount spent by the boozer on booze.

How much do we spend on booze? From memory it’s around £55 billion a year actually.

So, actually, even by our idiot Tory MP’s reasoning, we’re not paying any price at all: we’re getting at least as much benefit from boozing as it costs us. Excellent, fuck off then.

But it gets worse:

An alcohol strategy that would work should include the following: minimum pricing of 50p a unit,

The problem with this is that it just increases the profits of the booze industry. It’s also, as far as I know, illegal under EU rules. But even if not, we’re still just increasing profits. To which our idiot Tory MP says yes but:

To those who feel that minimum pricing would just hand greater profits to the drinks industry, there are many suggestions: varying VAT between on- and off-licensed premises to offset a rise in duty without penalising pubs or clubs, or a levy on unopened bottles of between 5p and 10p per unit.

Which is exactly the point that we’re all trying to make. Vary the taxes you idiot, if you want to change the price. Don’t just boost the industry profits, get more money for the Treasury!

Just if any politician should happen to pass by just let me explain the logic again here. Minimum prices are a bad idea because it just increases industry profits. If you want to raise the price of alcohol you should raise the taxes on alcohol, so that the Treasury gains the money, not the industry. The response “well, we’ll change taxes to deal with the problems of minimum prices” doesn’t work. Just change the taxes and forget the minimum prices.

Figures last year suggested that binge-drinking injuries cost the NHS more than £2.7 billion a year. They showed that almost a million people a year were taken to hospital after drinking – a rise of 47 per cent since 2004.

This isn’t actually what the figures show at all:

The big (old) news is that there were more than a million alcohol-related hospital admissions last year in the UK despite (and this is rarely mentioned) alcohol consumption having been in decline for the last eight years, and despite (this is never mentioned) Britain having the third highest alcohol taxes in the world. This is a doubling in admissions in less than a decade. A truly remarkable phenomenon, if true.

In my naïvité, I always imagined that it was doctors and nurses who decided whether a hospital admission was alcohol-related, but then I read this post at the always informative Straight Statistics, which explains that hospital admissions data are divided up according to various assumptions. For example, it is assumed that 20% of all stomach cancer admissions are alcohol-related, half of epilepsy admissions are alcohol-related and a quarter of admissions for extreme cold are alcohol-related.

These assumptions are based on individual epidemiological studies which may or may not reflect the true risks. Whether true or not, if a man goes to hospital complaining of hypertension, he will make up a quarter of an alcohol-related admission, even if he is a teetotaler. If he goes to hospital 8 times, he will have added two alcohol-related admissions to the statistics—remember, these are admissions, not different individuals. The system is called ‘alcohol-attributable fractions’ and you can read all about it here should you wish.

It’s a bit like those lovely models the Obama Administration uses to show how effective the stimulus has been. If we assume that spending money creates jobs then we can show that having spent money we’ve created jobs.

If we assume that x fraction of hospital visits are from booze then we can show that x fraction of hospital visits are from booze.

In neither case is anyone actually counting the cases.

The report by think tank 2020Health cites research showing that those drinking twice the recommended weekly limits increase their risk of liver disease sevenfold, mouth cancer fivefold and stroke threefold. For women, breast cancer risk doubles.

People find that drinking wine helps them to relax more than spending time with their children

We needed a survey to tell us this?

Five men have been killed and another seriously injured in a huge explosion at a Boston industrial estate amid claims it was sparked by an illegal vodka making operation.

Stick the tax up too high and people will homebrew.

That people are homebrewing might be an indication that taxes are too high.

It’s a general point that has to be kept in mind about tax rates. You can’t assume that everyone is going to obey the law. Yes, of course, distilling (as opposed to brewing) is illegal, it’s tax evasion not avoidance, but people will still do such things if they perceive tax rates to be too high.

And the very fact that people are doing such evasion is a sign that the people doing it think that rates are too high.

That general point again: tax evasion is proof that the people doing the tax evading think tax rates are too high.

Back to the specific case about booze: do we think that ever higher taxes on booze would lead to more such moonshining? And at what point does the harm caused by the consumption of moonshine ( you’ve actually got to be good at distilling not to poison people with methyl alcohol) outweigh the harm not done by the law abiding not boozing as a result of the price of booze?

Something for the puritans to ponder perhaps?

What do you do with alcoholics who don’t want to be cured?

Get them off the streets of course, out of the emergency rooms, stop arrresting and jailing them. Put them in a “wet house”. Just like sheltered living for addicts who want to get off the juice, but let them drink while they’re there.

If they want to drink themselves to death, well, fine, just don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.

Now all we need is for the same logic to extend to drugs…..

The cost of alcohol to British society is currently estimated at over £25bn per annum. This is not just the health costs, but also costs relating to crime and disorder, including domestic violence and fights and accidents on the streets. Health workers see the personal costs; we see the fractured families, the individual tragedies of wholly preventable death and disability. And we want action, now, to start to address this complex problem.

Before we do this, can we have a look at the benefits of alcohol consumption please? As I’ve said before, there must be some or people wouldn’t booze, would they?

In a free market, one where people partake of voluntary transactions, the perceived benefit to those handing over their money for a particular good or service must be higher than the amount of cash they hand over for that good or service.

This is something that you implicitly acknowledge when you say that higher prices will lead to less boozing: some will conclude that the pleasure they get from drinking will not be worth the extra cost.

So, we have an easy way of estimating what the drinkers of this country think drinking is worth: more than they pay for it.

They pay of the order of £50 billion for booze. Thus, even if we believe your kitchen sink estimation of the costs, booze makes us colletively, at minimum, £25 billion richer.

At which point you and your fellow prodnoses can bugger off, can’t they?

Heineken announcing this week that it is reducing the strength of “a leading brand” – thought to be the cider Strongbow – by 1pc alcohol by volume, from 5.3pc to 4.3pc as “just the start” of attempts to lower the alcoholic content of its drinks;

I’m sure they’re entirely happy to do this.

For booze is taxed on the level of alcohol in it. Reduce the level of alcohol and you redice the tax paid: not that this is likely to mean a cut in the price charged of course.

By anecdote, one of the Watney’s brands was withdrawn from sale once alcohol levels had to be stated (might have been when Original Gravity had to be displayed) as it was so low in alcohol that it wasn’t, legally regared as alcoholic.

They had, of course, been charging full whack for it….

Sir Richard Thompson, President of the Royal College of Physicians, said: “How many more people have to die from alcohol-related conditions, and how many more families devastated by the consequences before the Government takes the situation as seriously as it took the dangers of tobacco?

“We already know from the international evidence that the main ways to reduce alcohol consumption are to increase the price and reduce the availability of alcohol, yet the government continues to discuss implementing marginal measures while ignoring this evidence.

Hmm. So, that international evidence:

Deaths from liver disease have doubled in Britain in recent years while other countries such as France have seen “profound” falls thanks in part to “strict” rules on marketing drink, a strongly-worded article in The Lancet claims.

OK, France is one to copy then.

In France, “very strict regulation of alcohol marketing” and a market “saturated with cheap wine” led to the industry focusing on increasing quality, and so reducing deaths.

Oh. So what we actually want to do is flood the country with cheap cider so that manufacturers concentrate upon quality not quantity then.

You know, do as the French.

Which leads us to the question: Has Sir Richard Thompson actually read the report he is pontificating about?

However separate figures that strip out teetotals (14.4 per cent of Britons) show that drinkers in Britain consume an average 15.6 litres of pure alcohol. Women drink 9.50 litres and men manage 21.5.

On this calculation, however, Britain is out-drunk by about half the countries in the world including Muslim majority nations such as Egypt and Iraq.

The government’s “responsibility” deal on alcohol looks likely to fall apart as health experts, angered by the limited concessions required of the drinks industry, consider walking away from the table.

The deal, between the industry, the government and health experts – including the chiefs of groups such as Alcohol Concern and the British Liver Trust, as well as senior doctors working on alcohol-related health problems – was billed, when launched last summer, as a fresh, collaborative approach to a serious public health problem.

So?

Now me, I’m of the impression that we’re a parliamentary democracy. Not a corporatist state.

If some fake charity dressed up as a part of “civil society” like Alcohol Concern (in reality, just a fig leaf for the prodnoses who would have all joy and fun sucked from the world) decide that they don’t like the laws that the government is going to pass, or are unhappy with “the deal” being made well, fine, fuck off then.

Who in buggery elected you?

Sextarius, a Roman measure for liquids…. This measure held two cotylae, or heminae, being about an English pint and a half…. The sextarius was also the sixth part of a congius, a liquid measure of ten libra in weight (about one gallon). It was the moderate quantity of wine which persons of sober habits drank at their meals…

Hmm.

That’s (using American pints) .7 of a litre or so, or 4 ish of a standard modern glass of wine.

Nowadays, a standard glass of wine is served in a 175ml glass and is often up to 13% ABV, which adds up to 2.3 units.

Hmm, so a moderate quantity of wine which a person of sober habits would have with their meal was about 9 units.

We are told, for instance, that for women 14 units of alcohol a week is the recommended limit, and for men 21

So Roman women could have one and a half meals a week, Roman men two and a half.

No wonder they’re all dead then.