Taxpayers are footing a £130m-a-year bill for disability benefit claims linked to alcohol and drug abuse, official statistics show.
What’s a civilisation for if we can’t divert 0.005% of everything to supporting boozers, topers and souses?
Canada has begun stripping US alcohol from its shelves in retaliation against Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.
Retail outlets under the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), Canada’s largest province, will take US products off its shelves from Tuesday as the fight-back against the president’s 25pc levy begins.
The LCBO, which sells almost $1 billion ($688 million) worth of American wine, beer, spirits and seltzers annually, will also remove US products from its catalogue, according to Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario.
Presumably the state run, state owned (OK, Province for pendants) has already paid for this booze. Or at least contracted to pay for it. So the taxpayers of Ontario now have to cover the costs of this political gesture.
Well done there, well done there.
BTW, anyone got a phone number? There might be a stock of booze going cheap, so I hear……
Every cigarette smoked cuts 20 minutes off a person’s life, a study has claimed.
An analysis by scientists at University College London (UCL), commissioned by the Government, found that the harm caused by smoking shaved an average of 22 minutes per cigarette off the lifespan of a woman, with a loss of 17 minutes for a man.
The findings are up to twice as much as previous estimates which claimed that an individual cigarette costs 11 minutes of a person’s life.
Researchers said that the harm caused by smoking was cumulative and that the sooner a person stopped smoking, and the more cigarettes they avoided smoking, the longer they lived.
No, not whether this is true, but if they believed it was?
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill would also
It wouldn’t regulate vapes, would it?
It does regulate vapes therefore they don’t believe it.
But it’s no coincidence so many beers are reducing their ABV and that so many are settling on 3.4pc.
The real reason they are watering down your pint to this level, experts say, is because it allows them to save tens of millions of pounds in alcohol duty each year, thanks to reforms made under the previous Conservative government.
In August last year, the Tories expanded the duty discount for lower-strength beers from 2.8pc ABV up to 3.4pc ABV.
Under the new system, draught beers with a strength between 1.3pc and 3.4pc pay £8.42 in duty per litre of pure alcohol. Any beer from 3.5pc to 8.4pc pay significantly more, at £19.08 per litre of pure alcohol.
In practical terms, for every pint Carlsberg sells on tap, it is saving 25p in alcohol duty by lowering its ABV from 3.8pc to 3.4pc. We drink 7.8 billion pints each year in Britain, so these savings quickly add up.
Kim Verberckmoes, of accountancy firm Blick Rothenberg, says she expects “more and more brewers will be looking to lower their ABV to fall into the lower duty bracket”.
Never quite sure whether this was true or not. But the story is that Watney’s Starlight was so weak that it didn’t classify as a beer at all. Not that they dropped the price to match it not paying duty at all.
The former King Edward’s school, a grand Georgian building in Bath that Samuel Smith purchased in the 1980s, has experienced a similar fate. Plans to convert it from a school to a licensed premises were submitted and withdrawn twice, before being submitted again and approved in 2009. Despite planning permission, the work has never commenced. The building, which has sat empty for nearly four decades, is on the English Heritage register of significant historic buildings “at risk” of irreversible decay.
It’s a lovely building. Almost, sorta, a Georgian manor right in the heart of town. Sadly, wouldn’t make a grand house – it’s on a steep hill that cars and lorries have to crash through gears to get up. But only a couple of months back I walked past it and thought, hmm, why’s that just empty and rotting then?
(Just for funsies, it’s the building Bill Bailey went to school in. And, for those who like voice actors in games, Toby Longworth).
Is this real? It’s absurdly real. A team of researchers from Harvard University spent time in three Boston pubs, watching 160 groups of customers. The behaviour was so uniform that they could eventually predict it. If a group had more men than women, a man would race to the bar within seconds to get drinks for everyone. But if it had more women than men, it would take significantly longer to get a round in.
And when did the women get the first drinks in? Never. They never did.
Why do men do this? The same reason all male animals do – to show that they are the best possible partner for females. Deers rut, koalas shout, peacocks show off, men hop on the Wetherspoon’s app and get a tray of Jägerbombs in. It’s a tale as old as time.
Yes, obviously, etc.
But the one group who should read this, even do the work to stuggle to understand it – look, sorry, but certain social activities really are buried way down in that lizard brain – is the one group that will never bother. I mean the female columnists for The Guardian of course.
The Russian security council deputy head, Dmitry Medvedev, has described the editors of the Times newspaper in Britain as “legitimate military targets” in response to the newspaper’s coverage of the assassination of a Russian general.
I’ve seen – somewhere around – that Medvedev is in something like the Yeltsin cabinet years. Not a wholly and entirely sober view of the world shall we say.
Today it is an annual five-day festival at Eastnor Deer Park for 20,000 people, a beloved Herefordshire fixture that has seen the likes of Tom Jones and Manic Street Preachers grace the main stage. Year on year, our audience comes to enjoy over 200 bands, down 50,000 pints of cold beer, eat 30,000 tonnes of food and flatten 50 acres of grass.
20k people eat 30k tonnes of food over 5 days?
Wha?
1.5 tonnes of food per head over 5 days, that’s 300 kg of food a day.
It’s a joyous weekend and a major cultural date for the West Country.
And since when in buggery has Herefordshire been part of the West Country? It’s the fields bit of the West Mindlands.
Not that I actually know the numbers here but:
At least 10,000 bar and door staff are to be trained to spot drink-spiking as part of plans to make it a specific offence punishable by prison.
The Home Office is to pay for the training from next month with 10,000 staff expected to complete it by the spring to tackle spiking. Polls show up to one in 10 women have been victims of the crime.
2.5 million women have had their drinks spiked? Just not one of those numbers I’m tempted to believe. I have actually seen someone spiked – there was a rash of this in Russia. But it makes you so falling down, flat out, dead drunk that it’s obvious.
So, anyone got an idea of how actually prevalent this is? Rather than how many exit in the minds of campaigners? Any NHS reports of people turning up with rohypnol in the system, that sort of things?
Researchers are conducting the UK’s first major scientific trials to establish whether giving homeless people cash is a more effective way of reducing poverty than traditional forms of help.
Poverty campaigners have long believed that cash transfers are the most cost-effective way of helping people, but most studies have examined schemes in developing countries.
The new study, funded by the government and carried out by King’s College London (KCL) and the homelessness charity Greater Change, will recruit 360 people in England and Wales. Half will continue to get help from frontline charities. The other half will get additional help from Greater Change, whose support workers will discuss their financial problems then pay for items such as rent deposits, outstanding debts, work equipment, white goods, furniture or new clothes. They do not make direct transfers to avoid benefits being stopped due to a cash influx.
If homelessness here is defined as rough sleeping then I don’t think this will work. For one set of rough sleepers – teeange runaways etc – there is already a large and very effective charity network. Which usually finds and sorts out within a couple of days of rough sleeping. Not entirely solves etc, but does distinctly help.
Then there’s the hard core of rough sleepers. And as we’ve discussed here many a time it’s not, in fact, either money or even housing which is the problem here. It’s the ability to stay in housing once its achieved – stay in the face of the significant addiction or mental health – or both – problems being suffered.
That is, there’s a portion – small, but it exists – of the population who cannot deal with this Care in the Community idea and who would be much better served by a looney bin. Which, of course, we don’t have any more, not for these halfway but not fully competent cases.
More money, aid into housing, it’s just not the solution for them. Of course, it is for the teen runaways. But they’re already being aided. So, no, I don’t think this is going to work. A claim might be made, after the experiment, that it has but I’ll still be v doubtful. Because – and here’s a prediction to be run against whatever result gets announced in time – they’ll count the teens as housed sa being success when they would already get there under the current dispensation. And I don;t think they’ll have – not long term – success with the dipsos that are the hard core of the problem.
British lawyer, 28, dies after suspected mass drink-spiking in Laos
“Spiking” means deliberately done.
A British lawyer has died and several other UK tourists are in hospital after apparently being poisoned by a drink laced with methanol in Laos.
Simone White, 28, is suspected to have unknowingly drunk methanol at a bar in Vang Vieng last week while on holiday.
Far more likely – to the point of near certainty – is cheaply made local hooch and not well made cheap local hooch.
Only got to get your condensation temperature a few degrees out and you’ll be collecting the methanol from your still, not the ethanol. With the above results.
Pub bosses have been warned ministers could bring in minimum alcohol pricing as part of the Government’s public health drive, sources have told The Telegraph.
Industry insiders said they had been privately told the policy could be on the table if they do not take more action to tackle the harms of alcohol.
Yes, yes, OK, so it didn’t work in Scotland but it will here! But more than that. Booze in pucs is already massively more expensive than supermarkets for home consumption. Minimum pricing would – at any believable level only marginally but still – benefit pubs by closing that price gap. Why would you warn pubs that you might make them better off?
The Ryanair chief told The Telegraph: “The airports of course are opposed to it and say that their bars don’t serve drunken passengers. But they do serve the relatives of the drunken passenger.”
Flights from the UK are particularly prone to violence, especially on services to so-called “party destinations” such as Ibiza and some Greek islands from regional airports including Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Stereotypes are just a shorthand for repeated observation, right?
For the regular boozer it is a source of great comfort: the fat pile of studies that say a daily tipple is better for a longer life than avoiding alcohol completely.
But a new analysis challenges the thinking and blames the rosy message on flawed research that compares drinkers with people who are sick and sober.
Scientists in Canada delved into 107 published studies on people’s drinking habits and how long they lived. In most cases, they found that drinkers were compared with people who abstained or consumed very little alcohol, without taking into account that some had cut down or quit through ill health.
People have been adjusting for that for decades. It’s nonsense.
“It’s been a propaganda coup for the alcohol industry to propose that moderate use of their product lengthens people’s lives,” said Dr Tim Stockwell, first author on the study and a scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria.
But then Stockwell is a loon.
Keep an eye open for Chris Snowdon’s rebuttal of this. He’s the expert on this sort of tosh.
An Italian former culture minister has defended a drunk tourist who simulated having sex with a Florence statue, describing her behaviour as “as an amorous exaltation”.
The blonde woman, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, provoked an outcry after she was photographed climbing onto the statue of Bacchus.
A replica of a 16th-century original by Giambologna, the statue sits in a niche on a street near the Ponte Vecchio bridge.
Images posted on the “Welcome to Florence” Facebook page show the young woman hugging and kissing the statue and then simulating sexual positions.
A statue of Bacchus, God of wine and fertility (which just goes to show that beer goggles are not a new invention).
Rock ‘ard he was, rock ‘ard – more than usually achieved by the bibulous.
JEREMY CLARKSON
The Clarkson Arms: yes, I’ve bought a pub (full of dead rats)
The difficulty with a pub is getting people to come to it. If you;ve got star power then you can do that. Clarkson hsa star power, people will come to hte new pub and he’ll make a fortune. QED.
City law firms have been urged to stop hosting work socials at the pub over fears they exclude Muslim staff.
A report by Rare, a UK graduate recruitment company specialising in diversity, said the legal profession’s “big drinking culture” is unfair to those who abstain from alcohol.
It suggested that law firms introduce more cooking, painting or pottery classes to boost team bonding, rather than hosting events centred on booze.
We’re in a society where a pint and a natter is a usual and normal method of social bonding. Apparently we’ve got to change this in order to incorporate the immigrants. Rather than they picking up our habits. Even if that does mean an OJ and a natter.
Sigh.
It added: “‘Fresh ale’ provides exciting new opportunities for pubs to serve ale, all while preserving the beloved handpull ritual that delivers the traditional theatre of serve that ale is famed for.”
Shoot them. Not particularly because of the beer thing, just that language and justification.
The “Chicken King” himself has said the price of a bird has now become too cheap.
“How can it be right that a whole chicken costs less than a pint of beer?,” Boparan said in 2021.
Reduce beer duty now!
As the dream of home ownership becomes further out of reach for many younger Britons, Generation Rent is facing an entirely new challenge.
For young professionals living in cities such as London, the economics of owning a car no longer make sense.
“It is getting harder and harder to own a car and it is becoming harder and harder to run,” says Andrew Smith, managing director of Sixt, the vehicle rental company.
So it’s PR blather, obviously. But more than that it’s blather anyway. Students and young professionals in London didn’t run a car there 4 decades back either. Why would you?
Sure, folk who do a real job with a toolbox, but office work? Pah, and fie.
Anyway, would interfere with the drinking too much.