Friday 30 November 2012

Minimum pricing debate on Sky

I did a lot of media on Wednesday when the minimum pricing consultation was announced. For those who are interested, here's the Sky News discussion.




You can also see me much earlier in the day on BBC Breakfast.

On another note, these are very encouraging words from the new head of the Charity Commission.

6 comments:

Suboptimal Planet said...

It's shocking that the likes of Dr Gerada are given airtime. My favourite bit was her reaction to your suggestion that we let adults decide how they want to live.

Keep up the good fight.

Jonathan Bagley said...

The fact that consumption has decreased from 2006, allowing the hypothesis to be tested, is a powerful argument; but the large 12 year decline will surely lead to a fall in alcohol liver disease, which the anti alcohol lobby will then claim as a successful outcome of its policy.

I don't think there has been enough focus on illegal alcohol, homemade alcohol and smuggling. Industrial scale stills are operating and their products sold in corner shops. This is with vodka costing £9.Raising the price to £12 seems crazy. Raising the price of a 12.5% table wine from £3.59 to £4.22 will nudge many people into making their own for £1.30. I'll be one of them. I'll not be selling it to my neighbours, but many will. An OK French table wine costs £2. Large-scale smuggling and legal purchase for own consumption will become widespread - just as with hand rolling tobacco.

Ivan D said...

Great job Chris. If that woman on Sky is a typical example of a GP in terms of her intellect then I would suggest that the medical colleges take a good look at their recruitment criteria.

She refuses to contemplate statistics on falling consumption based on her own anecdotal evidence but faced with anecdotal evidence of Norwegians drinking themselves senseless says we need to look at the health statistics.

The Health secretary on the other hand seems to be full of statistics all of which are speculative and not very good guesses at that.

Still "something must be done" even if it is unfair, autocratic and based on no sensible evidence whatsoever.

Bucko said...

Brilliant. That was a real pleasure to watch.
Let adults make their own choices? They'll never go for that :-)

Anonymous said...

It's amazing how easily corrupted politicians are, isn't it? Mr Hunt reckons that the lives of TWO PEOPLE PER DAY (!) will be saved. Erm.. that's two out of about 1,400 a day, give or take 50 or so. (There are 500,000 deaths each year in England and Wales)

But we notice that his real point concerned violence in town centres, which is why this legislation is being proposed by the Home Office and not the DoH. The health argument is not really relevant.

What was it Hunt said? 5,000 'alcohol related events' per an will not happen? Now... what is that per weekend? About 100? And how many towns are there in England and Wales? I believe it too be over 1000. So that is one event per ten towns per weekend. So how much police time (and NHS time) is the reduction of those events going to save? And that is assuming that minimum pricing works. How on earth they can expect the people who would no longer be able to afford to 'pre-load' to still be able to go out on the the town, heaven only knows. A classic case of statistics losing all sense of reality.

JohnB said...

There are some useful comments on Glantz and “eradicating smoking from movies” on Siegel’s current thread.