There appears to be an endless stream of stories about teenage drinking, binge drinking and our generally drinking culture in the press. You’d almost think that every time they get stuck for something to print out comes some sort of drinking story. Now there’s great debate over the 24 hour licensing laws that came into force last year. Personally I’m for them, thought to be honest I would have been happy if they’d just got rid of the 20 minute drinking up rule.
A pint of beer should take any sane person more than 20 minutes to drink especially if it’s your third or forth of the night. In England what happens is that you decide you don’t want to go home just yet, get another drink from the bar at 11 pm, the bar happily takes your money off you and 5 minutes later they are asking you to leave. 20 minutes later they take whatever is left of your pint from you and kick you out. This in turn leads people to down their pints. It would be better for everyone if you could just finish up in your own time (this is what largely happens in Northern Ireland). Of course the pubs (chains) are then employing staff to do very little whilst not bringing in money and hence probably want customers out as soon as possible. The so called desire for a contential cafe culture is never going to be achieved when you get asked to down your pint or leave your pint and go. 24 hour licensing partly resolves this issue were the pubs stay open later than normal. Unfortunately most pubs still shut at 11pm.
Teenage drinking is another one that annoys me. Not because I begrudge the teenagers that drink, I think you really need more for kids to do in most of the country, but because I’m sick of the politicans going on about it. The Torries today came out with the idea of an extra tax on alcopops. This is all well and good but wouldn’t it just be simpler to implement the current licensing laws. Anyone who has ever been to the US knowns that you need to carry your passport everywhere if you want to get a drink. The reason is simple, get caught serving to someone underage and the premises losses its license. I’ve been in resturants with 60 year old Americans and they’ve been ID’d. This was a little shocking but at least no one feels bad showing their ID. Similar powers exist in the UK they just aren’t implemented with any vigour. I suspect once a couple of dozen pubs have been shut down and several Tescos can no longer serve alchol, the industry would get fairly serious about not serving to kids who are underage. When you’ve the choice between making money or making more money and potentially going out of busniness with a reasonable level of certainity people will opt for option 1. At the minute there’s little to no risk for pubs/shops that are caught serving to kids and thus you may as well take the extra cash.
Get some politicans on Question Time and this is what they all say, what annoys me is they’ve been saying it for so long and not actually doing it that I really can’t be bothered to listen to it anymore. But why not do it? Well if my local pub got shut down because it got caught with an underage drinker I’d be annoyed. Added to this that envitably it would be potrayed as the one that slipped through, that the pub never servers to kids, oh and look here’s a picture don’t they look like they are 23? Honest mistake surely. Lots of upset locals who vote.. people lossing jobs.. important social hub lost leading to break down in the neighbour hood.. the whole thing would be seen as a draconian use of power for the rogue event of an underage drinker. The press, I fear, would in a word make it unpopular for the government. Unpopularity is never good, especailly when you want to stay in power. Of course the truth is that they aren’t rogue events, or if they are someone is making a lot of numbers up for fun.
I suspect we will continue with the status quo.Â