First Scotland raised the minimum on cheap drinks to combat the thirst of their own countrymen, then England started sniffing around the notion. After all, somewhere in there can be found more revenue for an insatiable Gordon Brown whose Labour Party's limits for stealth taxes and cash penalties knows no bounds.

However, as it is pointed out in Concussing yourself with cheap cider does not veto your right to fairness. Not sure when "fairness" has ever entered into the equation but the author makes a few good, if not tongue-in-cheek points:

I think we have to consign to the dustbin of dur the fact that it takes publicly funded research to establish that young people and alcoholics prefer drinks that don't cost very much, and move on.

What? And take away the rights of publically funded researchers to collect salaries pointing out the criminally obvious?!

Oh right, the country is bankrupt, the world economy is in the pisser and hmmm, it must be time to release a study on the drinking habits of The Young and The Poor and poke around the idea of making it more expensive for them to drink.

The writer also appears to rightly have it in for Sir Liam Donaldson:

Perhaps he is one of those who simply despise people he considers weak. What do you call them again? Oh yeah, Tories. His proposals are that alcohol be priced at a minimum of 50p a unit, and he defended all this with the rather emotive statement that the "quality of life of families and in cities and towns up and down the country is being eroded by the effects of excessive drinking. Cheap alcohol is killing us as never before." (I cannot stand it, by the way, when one's status and respectability are elevated by this airy reference to "families". Are we all in a family, or do you have to physically live with the buggers? Do we all deserve our quality of life to be considered, or just those with children and/or parents?)

Well of course, rallying around the empty slogan of children and families is the new vanguard of moral cowardice, innit?

It's a tactic the psychopathic morality of the Republican Party in America has used with great success for years.

Meanwhile, is it the fault of cheap alcohol that the UK is to lose 1 million more jobs?

Diversion. Don't look here, look over there. Those cheap drunks and corrupted youth.

*****



See any drunks among these faces?

This extraordinary painting depicting 103 figures from world history in striking detail has become the latest internet hit.

Message boards have erupted with contests to identify all those featured, who range from instantly recognisable figures like Gandhi to some more obscure figures such as Liu Xiang, the Chinese hurdler who limped out of the Beijing Olympics in the summer.