Tonight:
4°c
- Drinkers hammered: beer up 4p, wine up 14p
- Non-doms must pay £30,000 to stay here
- The party's over and the day of reckoning dawns
- Pretty dull, Alistair. That's good
- Quiet man who has proved too meek to inherit Brown's legacy
- An ideal messenger - he makes the shocking sound dull
- Darling struggles to deliver crowd-pleasers
- Darling's in a hole but Brown is to blame, says Cameron
Smokers warned you, when you cheered on Labour as it forced us out of pubs: "First they come for the smokers, then they'll come for the drinkers."
And so Alistair Darling looks set to prove, with threats to treat boozers as the new menace to society and tax them accordingly. He has a point - alcohol brings family breakdown, illness and violence, as well as much pleasure - but he does not have a workable policy to tackle these ills. The Government might have helped the police and councils clamp down on underage drinking, drunk and disorderly behaviour and publicans breaking the terms of their licences. Instead, it looks as if it will go for a tax grab that will only penalise the law-abiding - as the example of smoking shows.
One of the easiest ways to distinguish the English middle from the working class is that only middleclass smokers are stupid enough to pay the full price for cigarettes. When I smoked heavily I kept running into bar staff with "friends" who could do me a deal on 200 Silk Cut.
Meanwhile round the corner on the Holloway Road, illegal cigarette sellers ran thriving businesses from their little stalls. The police sent in sniffer dogs and lined the walls with spy cameras, but the cigarette men always came back because demand was high and profits large.
Years of chancellors raising the price of cigarettes have produced smuggling of lightly taxed or untaxed tobacco on a vast scale, and the same is happening to drink. The price difference between alcohol bought at a London Majestic and Calais warehouse is already wide and Darling will today make it wider - with predictable consequences. I must be careful not to make allegations against the small off-licences I frequent but their four-packs are at a suspiciously reasonable price and their delivery vans turn up at the strangest hours of the night.
The simple alternative to tax and crime is to enforce the existing law. Good councils are responding to the real public concern, which is not about the price of drink but drunkenness. Bromley has exclusion zones to stop public drinking and appeals for information on off-licences selling to teenagers. In Maidstone and Worthing-they have taken away licences from stores, including mighty Tesco.
Other councils don't follow suit because they are frightened big supermarket and pub chains will bog them down in expensive legal hearings. The Government might usefully have made it harder for lawyers to drag out the licensing process.
But instead of getting down to the boring work of making sure the law is obeyed, it will come up with a grandstanding tax gesture - which will punish the innocent and reward the smugglers.
