A minimum price for booze? That's just middle class puritanism

David Cameron has labelled the British culture of drunkenness a “scandal”, and the Daily Mail has described binge drinking as “creating a generation of aggressive and out-of-control women”.

If the scaremongers are to be believed, Britain is sinking into a bog of alcoholism of the sort depicted by William Hogarth in the 18th century.

Not only is it apparently unsafe to walk the streets on a Saturday night without being accosted by the human debris of our binge-drinking culture, but the medical treatment of those facing the long-term consequences of hitting the sauce is said to be slowly bankrupting the NHS.

The latest plan, perhaps inspired by the approach taken to illegal drugs over the past 40 years, is to “get tough” and “crackdown” on so-called problem boozers. With this in mind, the government is considering hitting drinkers in the wallet with a minimum price for a unit of alcohol.

The idea behind the minimum price is to dissuade the public from loading up on drink before hitting the town and getting even more legless. The proposal is backed by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, the Alcohol Health Alliance UK and the British Medical Association.

Scotland has already introduced a 50p minimum price and, this week, the Coalition announced a 10-week consultation on the issue after a Government-backed report recommended a price of 45p for a unit of alcohol.

Hyperbole aside, however, minimum pricing may not be the magic pill it’s cracked up to be. The evidence to suggest that the solution to Britain's apparent drink problem is to price people off alcohol is flimsy at best.

While  no doubt appealing to those who write the familiar headlines depicting an out-of-control horde of drinkers laying waste to British high streets every Saturday night, the statistics appear to show that the country’s drink problem (if it exists at all) lies beyond the reach of mere price controls.

According to the Office for National Statistics, average weekly consumption of alcohol in 2010 was highest among those who worked in middle class professions and lowest among those in routine and manual occupations. Despite the lurid tabloid depictions of the dreaded “out of control” women, the statistics also showed that professional women drank on average 9.2 units of alcohol a week compared with those in manual occupations who drank 6.2 units a week.

When it comes to age, adults aged over 45 were three times more likely to drink alcohol every day than younger people.

You may want to go back and read the last two paragraphs again. The people that are supposed to be getting loaded on cheap Alcopops every weekend; those the tabloids and the Government want to price off the booze – you know, the working classes – aren’t, as it happens, drinking anywhere near as much as their middle class counterparts.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that, in the years to come, it may be working class folk who are footing the drink-induced health bills of, not the Vicky Pollards of this world, but those with a class background that’s closer to that of her creators – the middle classes.

In actual fact, not only are media portrayals of a descent into nationwide alcoholism an excuse to sneer at pictures of half cut women and the lower orders who apparently no longer know their place, but they’re also grossly misleading, for alcohol consumption among Britons has been decreasing – and decreasing quite significantly – for a number of years.

Between 2005 and 2010, the average weekly alcohol consumption per adult decreased by almost a third, from 14.3 units to 11.5 units. Among men, average alcohol consumption decreased from 19.9 units to 15.9 units a week and for women the figure reduced from 9.4 units to 7.6 units.

The data was released earlier this year and to the credit of certain sections of the press the socio-economic differentials were picked up on. However, the data that showed a widespread decrease in alcohol consumption, if not exactly hushed up, didn't attract anywhere near the number of headlines the lurid descriptions of binge drinkers tend to. And there were certainly no accompanying photos of a country shunning the bottle and soberly going about its business.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Britain does have a drink problem. The next step is to identify those most in need of help in controlling their alcohol intake. As the statistics show, these tend to be middle-aged people from the middle classes – hardly the people who are going to be discouraged by a few extra pounds on a bottle of wine.

Am I the only one who suspects, however, that minimum pricing is not primarily about health, but rather about “cracking down” on that which Middle England is forever fretting about cracking down on: the working classes having too much of a good time?

Israel, Hamas, and why the conflict in Gaza needs less ideological posturing

Almost all of those with an overtly ideological take on the conflict in Israel/Palestine come across as slightly deranged. The justification offered by supporters of each side is that it is their faction that is in the right, their faction that is acting in self-defence, and that it is the other side which is motivated by little more than cynicism, bigotry and malevolence.

Behind each side's unwillingness to understand the other side is an element of truth of course; but covering this is plastered layer upon layer of dishonest rationalisation - rationalisation which is in many instances deployed to justify the murder of wholly innocent civilians.

For much of the past 40 years, the Likudniks of the Israeli government - together with their supporters in Britain and the US - have zealously put out the lie that the only way the Israelis can be made safer is by building settlements on stolen land. It was a Christian Restorationist who first espoused the demagogic idea that a land without a people needs a people without a land. Not only has this idea subsequently been used to justify the violent eviction of Arab farmers who have worked the same land as their great-grandfathers, but the Israeli religious Right, many of whom are open backers of Benjamin Netanyahu's government, are throwing them off this land in order to bring about the fulfilment of insane religious prophesies; and they fully expect the Palestinian Arabs to accept this expropriation, as apparently do many of their supporters.

Unfortunately, for those of us who want to live in the here and now and don't long for the apocalypse, the fanatics may yet get their wish; for as the founder of Israel David Ben-Gurion warned, Israel can be a Jewish state, it can be a democratic state, and it can be a state occupying the whole of historical Israel; it cannot be all three.

"Peace" appears not to be what the Israeli leadership is primarily interested in - at least not peace for the Palestinians - if its support for the settlers, as well as the recent statements of its ministers, are anything to go by. Over the weekend, Israel's Interior Minister Eli Yishai described the goal of the current Israeli operation as to "send Gaza back to the Middle Ages".

"Only then will Israel be calm for forty years," he added.

The genocidal rhetoric has been matched by deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai, who said that Palestinians firing rockets from Gaza would be punished with a "bigger holocaust" from the Israeli armed forces.

Would it be so far-fetched to suggest that statements like this contribute to a cheapening of Palestinian life?

You needn't to be an apologist for the occupation, however, to note that the state of Israel has been elevated to such demonic proportions on the Left as to make many such as myself, who have an instinctive sympathy with the Palestinians, recoil in horror. The calibre of much "support" for the Palestinian cause comes perilously close to asserting that if Israel didn't commit a crime, no crime has been committed. In other words - and yet again - it is the hand of the Jews that is behind all that is wrong in the world. Confused? Then witness the laptop humanitarians, who had very little to say about the estimated 30,000 deaths caused by the conflict in Syria, spring into a fanatical internationalism at the precise moment a handful (by comparison) of Palestinians are killed by Israeli rockets.

Call me a cynic, but the value of human life among many of my comrades appears to be dictated by power politics - if you are killed by an enemy of the United States, then I'm dreadfully sorry, but your life is worth less than if you've been killed by an ally of the United States.

Some fringe supporters of the Palestinian cause already sail perilously close to the wind in terms of anti-Semitism, with the actions of Israel being compared with those of the Nazis. Inherent in such comparisons is a sinister attempt to downplay the Holocaust. As the late French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch put it:

"What if the Jews themselves were Nazis? That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got."

Any reasonable person will concede that Israel has a right to defend its citizens from attack by the homicidal maniacs of Hamas. And it's facetious to assert that Hamas's anti-Semitism is in some sense a by-product of the Israeli occupation. On his first day in Auschwitz, reaching out the window of the hut in which he was imprisoned to grab hold of a large icicle with which to quench his thirst, camp survivor Primo Levi had the icicle snatched from his hand by one of the German guards; when he asked the guard why he had done this, Levi was met with a revealing line: "there is no why here".

There are extremely important lessons in such seemingly innocuous utterances: Anti-Semitism is pathological; there is no why.

During times of war, it is often suggested - and I've already heard it applied to this latest round of bombing - that we should "pray" for one or both sides in the conflict. I would suggest that prayer is the last thing this (or probably any) conflict needs. And not only do the Israelis and Palestinians need less prayer, but the conflict between the two nations would almost certainly benefit from less teleological ideology in general; for if both sides, including their supporters, dropped the incendiary preaching, zealotry and double standards, we might have a straightforward and solvable land dispute on our hands.

Originally published at The Independent.

War is never glorious, so why do we bully those who protest against poppy culture?

The surest way of finding oneself on the wrong side of our moral enforcers is, with words or with actions, to have caused a sacred group or individual of great national esteem “offence”.

From this starting point your fate is very much dependent upon whom it is you have had the misfortune to upset. Celebrities are generally fair game, as are politicians. Sport is a little more complicated, with footballers deemed worthy of a good proverbial kicking but Olympians for some reason beyond reproach. The police and the military, however, well – when it comes to “Bobbies” or “Our Boys” you can collectively bid adieu to every vestige of proportion, reason and restraint.

It is of little surprise, then, to learn that a furore has erupted over a decision by University of London Union (ULU) Vice-President Daniel Cooper to decline an invitation to lay a wreath at Sunday’s Remembrance Service, with fellow students and conservative commentators calling on Cooper to resign.

In his letter to the organisers, Cooper described the service as a commemoration that “doesn’t fit with” the “colossal loss of life, misery and suffering…[that] took place in WW1”.

In response, a former UCL student has described Copper as having “brought shame on himself and the 120,000 students he is supposed to represent”.

“The whole point of Remembrance Day as we know it today is to cast politics aside and pay tribute to the courage, bravery and selflessness of those in uniform both past and present,” Richard Pass writes.

An online petition has also been started to get Cooper removed from his position at the university.

I can’t say that I agree with the decision not a lay a wreath, mainly because I struggle to see how the idea of remembrance can be based selectively on “good” or “bad” wars. In most instances the argument rages over whether or not a war was just long after hostilities have ceased and troops have been brought home; therefore it’s perhaps best simply to put politics to one side and pay your respects.

That said, Sunday’s Remembrance Service, decked out as it was with royalty and establishment figures, was not in any sense apolitical, and Cooper’s refusal to lay a wreath has, if nothing else, punctured the aura of smug credence that for many years has been allowed to re-write the history of Britain at war – and more specifically the loss of life during the First World War.

Before you throw a grenade at your laptop, I’d like first of all to make one thing clear: I’m no pacifist. I believe that non-violence is an immoral position that by its very nature is reliant upon braver and more responsible individuals doing violence on one’s behalf. I believe that pacifism is, as George Orwell put it, “an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen”.

I am aware, however, that war is very often a racket. Harry Patch, who fought in World War One and died three years ago as the last surviving soldier, actually witnessed the slaughter of the “Great War”, and unlike those who wear their combat fatigues vicariously, described the conflict as nothing more than “organised murder”.

The poet Siegred Sasson also wrote penetratingly on the lacerating effect the First World War had on men who in many cases had only recently graduated from short trousers and bed wetting:

Lines of grey muttering faces, masked with fear,

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

An elementary truth, often buried underneath all the emotive verbiage about soldiers “defending our freedoms”, is that most of the 16 million killed in the First World War were working people killed in a sordid imperial scramble for resources. That’s it. There was nothing heroic, nor liberating, about perishing face down in a trench full of excrement in Flanders. Britain went to war as part of “a scramble for colonial possessions, markets and resources amongst the major nations”, as Cooper puts it in his letter. Those fortunate enough to survive the ensuing bloodbath were made unquestionably aware of that when they returned home to a Britain beset by misery, squalor and paupery. The pomp and jingoism, the endless processions and evocation of national pride, was little more than the smirk on the corpse, as subsequent attempts at revolution by a war-weary European working class went on to demonstrate.

The establishment likes to inform us that those who perished in the First World War died for our right to live in a free society. We may reflect, then, on whether a fitting legacy to the fallen is for subsequent generations to be bullied into conforming to a very limited notion of remembrance on behalf of those who were themselves bullied into fighting what can be described, accurately for once, as a rich man’s war.

An appropriate remembrance service truly fit for the dead might one day include a disclaimer detailing the lies those young men and women, packed off to war by a British establishment bloating and sating itself at home - and an establishment which was later to make every attempt at crawling up the backside of Hitler - were told. Until then, we should defend the right of people like Daniel Cooper to let their conscience decide the matter.

It's time to give Christopher Hitchens a statue

During his lifetime many of the late Christopher Hitchens’s most vociferous critics were former allies from the political left. How, it was asked, could a once radical polemicist have become a cheerleader for the neo-conservative project to remake the world? The late American author Studs Terkel probably echoed the feelings of much of the left when he described Hitchens as having been transformed from a “witty observer of the human condition to a bloody bore, seated at the far-right end of the bar”.

In death as in life Christopher Hitchens continues to court controversy. An online petition to erect a statue to the former contrarian in Red Lion Square, Holborn, supported by the British Humanist Association (BHA), is being vociferously opposed by local Labour councillors, one of whom has unflatteringly described the late Hitchens as a “pro-war islamophobe”.

"Gift of prose doesn't excuse support for illegal wars and the destruction of Muslims", Holborn councillor Awale Olad wrote on Twitter.

Those of us who admired Christopher Hitchens are already familiar with this sort of thing. Based on the stance he took on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, during the last decade of his life Christopher Hitchens’s name was often prefaced with disclaimers like “formerly of the left” and “neo-conservative”. Unflinching support for the overthrow of dictatorship supposedly meant that Hitchens had jettisoned the left-wing principles of his youth and metamorphasised “from a butterfly into a slug”, as the Respect MP George Galloway put it.

To be fair to Hitchens’s critics, the human cost of the war in Iraq has been so high that it’s right to expect a degree of contrition from those who supported it, not to mention from those who misled Parliament in the lead up to the war. Iraqis now have a political system that is much more democratic (not to mention much less dangerous) than anything that existed under Saddam Hussein, but the cost of getting there has been nothing less than a bloodbath.

Despite the smug certainties of the anti-war crowd, however – you may have noticed that they have very little to say on the 30,000 people killed in Syria - the real question in 2003 was whether or not war would be less bad than the continuation of a criminal totalitarian state where genocide, torture, mass graves and an all-pervasive security apparatus formed the backdrop to everyday life. Hitchens took the position that it would; and therefore reducing his entire political output to the words “pro-war” makes about as much sense as describing anyone who opposed the war as pro-Saddam – and it shouldn’t be forgotten that some were of course.

Those who misrepresent the views of Christopher Hitchens may also wish to consider the words of one of the characters in Ian McEwan’s Iraq war protest book Saturday. Discussing with his daughter the potential benefits of coalition forces entering Iraq, Dr Henry Perowne hedges a bet that the chance to turn one country in the Middle East around may “plant a seed” which spreads across the region.

“My fifty pounds says three months after the invasion there’ll be a free press in Iraq, and unmonitored internet access too. The reformers in Iran will be encouraged, those Syrian and Saudi and Libyan potentates will be getting the jitters.”

Since those words were written mass protests have threatened to topple the Iranian theocracy, Colonel Gadaffi is dead and the regime of Bashir al-Assad has resorted to extreme violence to retain its grip on power. It’s quite possible to have opposed the war in Iraq yet recognise that such developments may never have occurred had Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party remained in power.

In contrast to the anti-war marchers of February 2003, who sang and danced in Hyde Park as they called for the prolongation of one of the world’s worst dictatorships, Hitchens confided to his close friend Martin Amis that in the period when the Iraq war was at its worst he was in a “world of pain”. And yet were he still with us, there can be little doubt that Hitchens would have recognised that the tragedy in Syria is that Western military intervention, if it does come, may happen altogether too late. As most of us learned as children in the school playground, inaction is often no better than intervention on the side of the aggressor and against the victim.

It may surprise some people to learn that it’s possible to be on the left and take the opposite view to Holborn’s kitsch-left Labour councillors. For some of us, Hitchens represents a break only with those parts of the left that after 9/11 didn’t feel in any sense obliged to take responsibility or make any difficult decisions, mainly because they’d given up on ever attaining power and therefore thinking about how power might be used as a force for good in the world.

Ultimately, and in spite of this lengthy throat clearing, I would like to suggest that any decision as to whether or not it is correct to put up a statue to Christopher Hitchens should be based solely on whether or not this is an appropriate way to honour England’s greatest essayist since George Orwell.

Originally published at the Independent.