WHO ever thought I’d be sharing a view with Theresa May, Michael Gove and Andrew Lansley?
But I find myself, and rather worryingly, I’d applaud them for their common sense on this issue.
It seems this trio of Tory heavyweights have applied pressure to the PM to drop the minimum price for alcohol, if national newspaper reports are to be believed.
It seems that bastion of forward thinking, the Treasury, also said putting a price per unit in booze was also a no no - but only because it would stifle the steady flow of booze money via tax into the nation’s empty coffers.
The BMA aren’t happy saying that the PM would have missed a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save lives.”
I wouldn’t normally let a politician have a say in this column but the Tory MP David Davis, right, , who stood against Mr Cameron in the leadership election, says it better than I could: “It’ll hit poor people. It’ll hit people in the North. It’ll hit the pensioner having their one bottle of wine a week; it’ll hit the hard-up couple doing the same. It’s going to cost…it’s going to transfer £1billion from the public to the people who sell alcohol, and it’s not going to work.
“If you look at pricing across Europe, in Germany they sell beer at a pound a pint cheaper than they sell here. They sell in Spain the same, in France the same, and they do not have this problem. There’s a drinking divide in Britain, a cultural divide, and you will not solve it by this rather heavy-handed sort of mass effect that won’t actually stop the problem.
“If I wanted medical advice I’d go to a medic. This is a social policy issue: it’s much more complex than saying put the price up and we’ll stop it. The simple truth is, alcoholics are not sensitive about pennies. The biggest growing group of alcoholics are actually middle-class alcoholics, and this is not going to change the price of Château Lafite at Chequers either – this is going to hit poor people.”
Well said Mr Davis.
