Talking bollocks

The always admirable Wat Tyler highlights today the utter bollocks of the government's hilarious claim that Surrey and other similarly verdant parts of the Home Counties have been taken over by gangs of crazed middle-class drunks. It turns out that the most of the so-called research used to justify this insane assertion was in effect made up using what are called synthetic estimates, otherwise known as guesses. Read it here.

There is only one point I would like to add to this otherwise comprehensive rebuttal by the worthy Wat, and that is the use by the BBC, which of course accepts the report uncritically, of the terms Hazardous Drinking Hotspots and Harmful Drinking Hotspots to describe the sites of these shocking, Gin-Lane style revels. Here is the relevant webpage.

I know the BBC likes to dramatise stories. It's what journalists do, after all. But to call the likes of Runnymeade and Woking Hazardous Drinking Hotspots suggests a degree of hysteria akin to mental instability.

Think about it. In Runnymeade, 26.4% of adults (who the BBC helpfully points out are over 16) regularly drink between 22 and 50 'units' of alcohol a week. That's between seven and 16 glasses of wine or 11 and 25 pints a week. In other words, because two-and-a-half Runnymeadeans out of ten drink a glass of wine a day, the town is instantly designated a Hazardous Drinking Hotspot against which the full might of the nation's health fascists must be deployed.

This is getting serious.

There is more of the same health fascism to be found here, if you are interested.