Beacuse what supermarkets need is a boost to their profits...



It is flawed in Scotland and it is flawed down south.



Mind I did like Millibands line at PMQ's

May I join the procession of the, erm , elder community?



We drank beer too.

It wasn't as strong as, say, Stella is now and you usually got full before you got utterly blasted.

Sometimes (not always) we would be worse for wear by the end of the evening but never at the start of the evening because the whole point was to go out and enjoy the drinking.

Getting blasted as a preparation for a night out was never even considered.

Missed it, what was it?

"With the Uturn on minimum pricing on alcohol, just what can the PM do in a brewery?"

Even if that is the actual case, which is another debate, there are many, many doctors who see large numbers of the people you describe destroying their lives and those of their family by killing themselves on ultra cheap alcohol that they would have little or no access to if it was priced higher.

As someone said this morning, give it a try, if it doesn't work then drop the policy. There are pockets of the population who are simply being destroyed by cheap booze and perhaps pricing it beyond their reach in the first place might work. I haven't seen anyone even hint that this is a way of stiffing the poor again.

I'd also argue that with the financial stresses on the middle classes (one for the groups shown to be increasing in alcohol consumption), increasing the price will have an effect. Coming home from work can I really afford 10 quid a night on a bottle of wine? Maybe I can stretch to a fiver but at a certain price point you start to think, not tonight.

Again as someone said this morning, why can't supermarkets discount vegetables or household essentials instead of alcohol?

The minimum price for a bottle of wine at 12%abv would be under a fiver.

They're usually really lame in PMQs but that's not a bad one at all.



Couldn't organise a brew-up in a patisserie.

Another important factor but one which seems to pass the government by is that, just as in the case of fags, the higher the price of booze, the greater the profits for criminals to bootleg it. It is well known that the trade in counterfeit baccy and booze is worth many billions, and the more you put up the price, the more people will be driven into buying potentially very dodgy stuff, much of which the avergae punter wouldn't even readily know was dodgy - there are loads of off-licences etc who sell fake bottles of vodka and whisky and not all of them even know it, although I suspect many either do, or turn a blind eye to the provenance.



Maybe they could sell all spirits in plain bottles, like fags in brown paper. That would cut down on fake booze, wouldn't it?

We already have laws banning the serving to people who have already had too much and the offence of being drunk and disorderly ... do we need to enforce this better and make the penalties greater?

Neither have any effect of someone drinking a skin full of Ace "cider" at home every night.

Yes.

I took the educated decision to stop my 10 year homely stint of supping vast amounts of 2 litre bottles of White Lightning.

I believe my liver is in remission.

No, but could enforcement and penalties have an effect on public drukenness?