Another Government funded health body pushing for tax hikes on alcohol

The health fascists are at it again.

In a story, largely picked up and uncritically reported by the media, the North West Public Health Observatory NWPHO are pushing the idea that middle class drinkers regularly indulge in drinking ’hazardous’ levels of alcohol.

'Hazardous' drinking is defined as regularly consuming between 22 and 50 units a week for men. Guys - That would make you a hazardous drinker if you often have a pint and a half a day.

For women, hazardous drinking is defined as regularly consuming 15 to 35 units a week. Ladies – If my sums are correct that means you are a hazardous drinker if you often have a glass of wine a day.

So then. More of the current practice of picking a range of figures that is slanted to take in normal behaviour and allowing that to ‘inflate’ the results. Results that are then given an alarming semantically loaded label. A label that conceals the actual range and can be used to beat up on anyone who queries the figures.

Exactly why are they pushing this agenda? Someone has to pay for all that lost cigarette tax if the Government are to be kept in the style they are accustomed to.

Tellingly, having effectively invented, or at least massively inflated, a so-called ‘problem‘ the Director of the (you guessed it) NWPHO, Professor Mark Bellis, is pushing for ‘substantial’ increases in the price of alcohol to help to tackle it.

Now who funds the NWPHO? Why the people who tax us of course, the Government, through the Department of Health.

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The average French person drinks 60.13 Ltrs of wine per annum. That is over 80 bottles or around 321 glasses. Around the bottom end of the ‘Hazardous’ range.

So that would make the entire French nation (who are reputed to know a thing or two about wine and be reasonably healthy with it) hazardous drinkers according to the NWPHO…

Lots more 20 mph limits, many to have ‘safety’ camera revenue raisers

The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (Pacts) want to institute many more 20 mph zones and are arguing for average speed cameras to be installed in them.

They say Local Authorities are keen to introduce them.

Not half (as they say), set to a hair trigger they could be a highly lucrative new source of stealth taxation on the motorist.

Apart from the desire to take your money, what is one of the main ‘drivers’ for this further state persecution of motorists?

What else but NU-Lab Government targets. It this case of reducing deaths and serious injuries on the roads. Sounds laudable enough, but don’t they all. I guess they don’t believe their own “If you hit me at 30 mph…” propaganda any more…

More to the point - exactly what proportion of those killed, or seriously injured, on the roads are actually in a 20 or 30 mph zone when it happens?

Also how exactly do the define ‘serious’? Is it the same sort of trick they use reckoning ‘problem’, or ‘binge’ drinker figures?

Lies, damned lies and politician’s statistics.

It would probably be even more effective if they made it law that any cars in the zone required a person walking in front of them with a red flag. They could make it compulsory to hire a, council provided and licensed, trained flag bearer. They could then hire out the unemployed as flag bearers a condition of collecting their benefits.

Several birds with one stone including a massive reduction in unemployment figures and the ability to tax all motorists using the area if they exceed the speed limit by one and a half miles an hour or not.

Let’s hope they don’t think of that…