So – two prospects this morning. One is that George Osborne may or may not pass powers over orporation tax to Stormont. The other is that Health Minister Jim Wells is going to stop the flow of cheap booze.
I wrote on corporation tax yesterday and concluded that it was pretty unlikely it’d be passed into the hands of Stormont : if we got control of it, Scotland and Wales and maybe Yorkshire would want it too. I still feel that but I’m beginning to think that the next election may weigh more heavily with the Tories than any possible fracturing of the United Kingdom in the middle to long-term. If you face the prospect of being hanged in May, you tend to push the prospect of splitting into bits in five or tens years time onto the back burner. Osborne may well announce a hand-over of corporation tax powers to Stormont but not until after the next election. In other words, if you guys (for which read ‘the DUP’) don’t support us into government next time, you’ll be kissing goodbye to corporation tax control. Not, mind you, that it’ll make a helluva difference. The word is that Westminster will withhold from the annual subvention the money it will have lost by passing corporation tax powers here. (Side issue but interesting: that’s the first time I’ve heard talk about money going out of here; we’ve been fed a constant diet of how much comes in.)
Meanwhile Jim Wells is going to see to it that booze isn’t too cheap because it’s leading to all sorts of social and health problems. He has a point: alcohol does damage lives. It costs the NHS some £3.5 billion every year. Crimes involving alcohol are something over £11 billion per year. And in terms of productivity, alcohol costs some £7.3 billion a year in the UK.
And of course we here do our share of this damage. So raise the price of booze, right? If people haven’t the money, they can’t buy huge amounts of the stuff. But the trouble with that is, it assumes there is a point where people will find it too costly and will cut back on their alcohol consumption. And who are those most likely to be affected? Those with less money. The poor. So effectively we’re saying that booze is a problem of the working classes/undeserving poor and/or young people. Research in 2013 at the University of Sunderland found that white-collar workers are more often guilty of alcohol abuse than young people. So will these white-collar workers – or their bosses – be likely to cut back on their drinking because of the price? Maybe but probably not. The fact is, those with least money – the poor, the young – will be affected by the rise in the cost of booze. If we’re saying that’s where the problem lies – and as we’ve seen the University of Sunderland thinks differently about young people – then we’re saying the poor in alcohol terms are the problem.
I don’t know if they are – but let’s assume they are. The next question has to be, why? If I didn’t have a job or had one that paid a pittance, one of the first things I’d buy at the weekend and maybe during the week as well would be a bottle of booze. And I’d use it to soften the edges of my threadbare life. It makes sense in a troubled, bewildered way.
If the poor are the group where problem-drinking is most prevalent, the answer should be to address the causes of poverty, not the cost of booze. What is it in their lives that drives them, literally, to drink? And what is our society prepared to do so that more wealth is spread and that group which finds the need to escape from reality via alcohol will have better lives, with better education and better job prospects.
Besides, we know what happens when addicted people don’t have the money to feed their addiction: they steal. So if you want to raise the number of robberies, Jim, go ahead. Alcohol-dependent people won’t stop drinking – they’ll start stealing.
Must be Christmas time I agree with Jude and his comments about Alcohol indeed he is completely spot on.
Gravy trains and Food Banks
Spare a thought today for the thousands of people throughout the world who will endeavour to stay sober, just for today.
Spare a thought today for the homeless man (43) found dead just yards from Leinster House in Dublin.
Spare a thought today for those with nothing, not even a roof over their heads.
Spare a thought today for all the people who are obliged to work for a minimum wage, without subsidized food, transport, travelling expenses or a pension.
Spare a thought today for all the individuals who are unemployed, sick, terminally ill or who are challenged with a disability.
Will some elected representatives continue to tax our patience, today?
Nice one, Iolar – maith thú…
That was a good post , Jude. The old brain is whirring away. Where do you start with booze ? Us humans have had a hankering for the stuff since we figured out that eating and drinking fermented roots , herbs and vegetables and various sacred “magic” mushrooms, would alter our mundane realities…to see that “other” plane…. for a while …and relax our travails and troubles.In Ireland we even figured out how to make the stuff out of something as benign as the humble spud and the stuff can be made from something as innocuous as honey.
Before we could really trust drinking water, we made what were basically daytime ,light “session” ales for everyday consumption and “party” ales for work’s end and festivities.Spirits were used medicinally too , before we had anything other than herbs and plants for “cures”.
There’s no doubt about it , us humans enjoy getting off our heads now and again.A lot of animals do too. In a seasonal aside , they say that the idea of Santa’s flying reindeers came about because the Inuits observed the deer eating hallucinogenic fungi and getting high so they collected the reindeer urine in the snow and used the second-hand intoxicant themselves..the altered state is said to have been used by Siberian shamans and is one part of the Santa Claus origin story…..so don’t eat any yellow snow folks.
As teenagers way back in the mists of time in the 1960’s our favourite tipple was Triple Vintage Cider. It was cheap and a party- starter. As students one of the guys tried brewing beer from one of those kits from Boots Chemists that were popular. He produced gallons of this cheap, lethally intoxicating,bowel-thundering , gassy brew. The criteria was to get it cheap and get plenty of it.When I was first married the first thing i started making was wine …again from kits from Boots the Chemist. These were very popular and i could make four gallons at a time in an insulated , heated, foil-lined , T-Chest. It was perfect fit for for four bell-jars with the wee airlock on the top. …again , this stuff was cheap and cheerful and reasonably drinkable as the only competition on the shelves was over -priced Blue Nun or Black Tower.
Like I say , young people will figure out how to get some booze or dope to get themselves high.. It’ll not matter one damn how the stuff is priced . Mum and dad’s drinks cabinet will be raided and a tot of gin will be mixed with a tot of brandy or whatever .
The next obvious stage is to try and ban the stuff. Well they tried that one in America and it produced enough bathtub gin to float a large ship and introduced criminality right across the social scene.Something similar happened when drugs were banned .The criminals will always move in to fill the hole . They pushed the price of tobacco up ; they banned it indoors.Now criminals are bringing in adulterated rubbish tobacco and selling it cheap under the counter.There are now advertisements for E-cigarettes on television.People are going to search out that new kick no matter the legislation.
Jude
So just to be clear;
The tories will not hand over control of corporation tax out of self interest, but then again:
the tories probably will hand over control of corporation tax, out of self interest.
It seems the evil of the moustache twirling Brits is the one fixed point around which all constantly changing opinions can revolve.
Ah gio – what would I do without you to explain things to me? I concede that I’M a hopeless crystal ball gazer. One thing I know, however: the Tories will never do anything that isn’t in their interests. The world, excluding those dead from the neck up, know that. Their reasons for not handing over corporation tax control is obvious: everyone in the audience will say ‘What about us?’ But they might decide to claim that NI is a special case (and boy, is it a special case…) and so the same doesn’t apply to Scotland, Wales, etc. They’re now offering it provided the politicians here all agree to their nice welfare cuts – and of course they haven’t mentioned that if it is passed over to here, they’ll hack the difference out of our block grant. So am I saying the Tories are self-centred bastards either way?I sure am.
Jude
I was just amused that you came to 2 diametrically opposed conclusions based on the same premiss, that the Tories are bastards.
I’m no economist either so I have no more idea than you about the benefits of lowering corporation tax. I suspect it will not turn out to be the panacea our politicians seem to think it will be.
And yes I agree, the Tories will never do anything not in their own interests. But which parties would you say are not acting in their own interest? Are there any examples of parties acting against their own agenda for the greater good?
Gio
But it’s always so much easier to blame the “perfidious Brits”!Of course any of the centralised decisions taken by Sinn Fein are totally selfless and are not guided by any political advantage !!
History, the great stutterer, would appear to be repeating itself yet again, and will possibly continue to do so in the future.
In 1952 the angelic Kitty Wells in Nashville, Tn, opined that ‘It wasn’t God Who made Honky Tonk angels’. Now, her namesake, Jim is determined that this trend will be continued by his raising of the price of the demon drink. It this makes tipplers think again about whetting their whistle, then the Wells Embargo will have had some effect.
As you say, Esteemed Blogmeister, JW has a point, if not a pint of the Devil’s Buttermilk. Coincidentally, Kitty W duetted betimes with John D. Loudermilk who penned some devilishly clever songs as ‘Ebony Eyes’ to ‘Oooby dooby dooby doo’.and ‘Talk back Trembling Lips’. At this point it would be gratuitous to remark that he was a cousin of the superb Louvin Brothers (nee Loudermilk), one of whose names was (gulp) Ira, alas gone away to the Great Over Yonder.
Milk these days is no longer loud: ever since the bottled variety was replaced by the carton.
One wonders if the Wells, Kitty and Jim are in anyway related. Certainly, the similarities between the city of Saddlers Well and the Grand Ole Opry are such that London and Nashville might well be twinned. The recent revelation that Phil the Greek first began to correspond with his wife to be, who also happended to be his third cousin, when she was but a fragile flower of 13 summers brings to mind the Coalminer’s daughter, aka Loretta Lynne who was married at 15 and a grandmother at 29.
All of which prompts Perkie’s inner blue suede shoes shod Carl Perkins to speculate if indeed there might indeed be some kind of symbiotic relationship between the Butcher’s Apron and Butcher’s Holler in the blue grass state of Kentucky.
Nonetheless, should Norneverland be compelled perhaps unwillingly to develop a crush on Orange over the Festive Season there is always the possibility of its parched inhabitants doing a Katheen Ferrier. And allow the wind to blow themselves southerly in the direction of Katleen Ni Hooligan land. Where the streets, lawns and awnings alike, are paved with technicolour yawns.
No shortage of revelry in the Free Southern of late, causing it to be widely recognised as Hilarity Central. Starting with Mensa Man himself, Fintan O’Toole. No later than today he proved himself a worthy successor to the two John Healys of The Unionist Times on sweet-reasonable Quality Street.
While the two JH’s were distinctive in their habits – the Edwardian JH preferred to promenade around the streets of Liffeyside in his elegant spats while the Elizabethan JH was one who plumped for the brash Rolls Royce. It is a testament to the protean scope of Mensa Man that he combines the better elements of both his predecessors. One blessed with a Rolls Royce brain who likes nothing better than a spat or two.
This week Ear-flapped Fintan has gone into Elmer Fudd mode as he has been forced to take a few potshots at a particular Wabbit who has been wunning wather wild of late and encwoaching on Fintan Fudd’s patch in the Fourth Estate.
What’s up, doc? Pat Wabbit (for it is he!) after he had been given the option to jump or be hushed from his Ministerial Wole in the Fwee Southern Stateen government has been anything but silenced. Anything but, indeed. Like the soot from an erupting volcano in Iceland or the sand from the Sahara in the ghibli season he is all OVER the place.Doing what he does best, wabbiting on in that unique pompous (for a wabbit) way of his.
Any innocent who didn’t know about these things would actually imagine this pair of cartoon figures were on opposite sides. Not true; observe their common hymn book. It contains the same Looney Tunes. It can only be a matter of time before the Wabbit from the West becomes a Fifth Columnist on Quality Street. He is eminently q. to joint the St Ainthood of those same columnists: St aters, St oops and St icks. Like his ‘adversary’ Fintan, he boxes all the thicks.
A former daily communicator of the same parish, one Field Marshal Kevin Myers, Ist Vscount Myers of Assinity, KG, GCB, DSO, PC was another one who has been contributing greatly to the ongoing merriment and mirth south of the Black Pig’s Dyke. Plugging his latest tome, ‘Flogging the Dead Donkey 14-18: the Disorder I refuse to Drop’ this son of Leicester is no bigot.
But rather a self-confessed vicitm of obsessonal compulsive disorder when it comes to replacing the Trench Coat with the Trench Foot as THE great emblem of entrenched Irish delusion. Carrying the self-constructed cross of his own design, it would take some stretch of imaginative elastic to describe his book- flogging hopstop from receptiive studo to r. s. as a Via Dolorosa. A thorny way, it was not. Ra-ther.
Some of the stacatto phrases which slipped from the motorised mouth of Myers in that distincive clipped military moustachioed way of his were: ‘the artificial ignorance of the Ahrish regarding the Great War which I discovered on first arriving in Ahland’, ‘One felt morally obliged to…’, ‘Indoctrinated artifical ignorance’, ‘to…construct an alternative national narrative’.
Though the souper-star could well have said ‘Knorritive’, Perkie’s ears being not quite up to speed with the morally s. and khaki clad tones of Kev’s reverential delivery in the Midlands anglo-saxon dialect of his upbriging. .
Larf? There was scarcely a dry eye west of Ireland’s Eye. Not least when the Leicester anti-bigot came to the great thigh-slapping moment of his poppy red and Redmonidte routine. It concerned a visit to a old dear in darkest Rathgar, an old Protestant dear, indeed an old Presbyterian dear. Her name wasn’t mentioned, though it may well have been Moll.
In an atmostphere of chintz, hush and port wine nostalgia she recalled how her unamed childhood sweetheart – Paul perhaps – took the King’s shilling, oops, answered the King’s call willingly at the going down of the sun. Never to return.
And as Kev discreetly took his leave from the sad old dear he bent down to kiss her cheek soflty. This was the touching moment she whispered to him that he was the first man to kiss that cheek since 1914. A tear stood in Kev’s eye, as he realised Moll still loved Paul. And he thought too of all the other Ahrish Molls like her. Every Ahrish village must have its own Moll Flanders, thought Perkie who freely admits to have been in floods himself.
Of course, the crux of all the great Thigh-slapping Moments of the Human Comedy is the the juxtaposition they embody. Think, the man whose hat blows off.
In Compassionate Kev’s case the old juxto lies in his native Leicester. Whose coat of arms shows a crest. In this crest on top of the arms may be seen a sliver legless wyvern with red and white wounds showing on a wreath of red and white. (And even possibly a wealth of Freudian implicatons). The legless wyvern distinguishes it as a Leicester wyvern as opposed to other wyveryn.
At this juncturne, Perkie’s ever present inner ignoramus pipes up: what’s a jaysus w for wyvern?
A wyvern, as even the calebs in the creative streets of Belfast know, is, of course, a legendary winged creature with a dragon’s head (which may be said to breathe fire or possess a venomous bite) and wings, a reptilian body with two legs (sometimes none, as in the case of the Leicester wyvern) and a barbed tail.
In other words, a near-perfect descripsh of Kev the Caped Crusader whom we all know, love and admire when he is laying in to all those Gaelic-speaking and 1916-worshiping obscurantists such as he used to do when on the staff of TUT on Quality Street.
And to think there was an old softie lurking under the scaly armoury of this fire-breathing wyvern, ready at the merest hint of a 14-18 sob story to display the eyeball moist.
Wot larks !
So, Perkie’s open inviation to the dry and down at mouth brethern in the Wee North is to come South this Yuletide, where even the wyverns are legless.
The self centred bastards in Dublin have just got an overdue kicking from Mary Lou who has just mentioned a number of establishment politicians including one Dessie O’Malley in the Dail.Brass neck of the year goes to CC Sean Barrett who says you cant make allegations against named individuals.He didnt apply that rule during the Cahill debate!
Ní thig leis an chraiceann is a luach a bheith acu.
They cannot have it both ways.
There was a deafening silence from An Ceann Comhairle and most of his colleagues when certain M.P’s used parliamentary privilege in Westminster to name individuals who were subsequently murdered in the north of Ireland. Ivor Roberts, a former diplomat is now questioning the point in the Irish Government pursuing the use of torture in the 1970.s. Who was it said, “You cannot handle the truth?”
Someone described Osborne as looking like he had just done something unspeakable to a servant, as for Wells, he is still the same big lunk who ran around Monaghan at the time of the Clontibret attack. Why does he have to pose in front of the Union jack? Surely he must know what nationality he claims to be?