MSM: news suppression service

... But the draft documents reveal how close the [Northern] Rock was to a virtual wipe-out.
The Daily Mail first learned of the bank's secret plans in January but, after a late night call from Mr Darling, was begged not to publish.

(From this morning's Grumbler.)

Has the Press become an arm of Government?

Off licence alcohol purchases - minimum age 21

At last, some small attempt to rein-in the alcoholisation of the young, even if only in Scotland.

Michael White confuses matters by yoking this good horse to a bad one (morning-after pills for the underaged). Nevertheless, I wonder if we might make progress in this direction, as with smoking, but perhaps in a different way. as it's not just the young who have drink problems.

I think availability is a key factor. Imagine having a beer (or other tipple of your choice) tap next to each cold-water tap in the home - who could resist? Yet alcohol is nearly as accessible these days - supermarkets, post offices, even petrol stations. Rather than try to enforce an age limit (another pile of arrest records to write), let's try to remove some of the temptation: let's reduce the number of off-licences.

My preferred solution would be not to renew the liquor licence for a supermarket if there is an alternative outlet within a certain distance. Supermarket shelving has a narrative all its own - and booze is near the end so we can say to ourselves or our partners, "Shall we?" "Go on, then." It's a cunningly-positioned add-on to household shopping, encouraging the potentially dangerous habit of steady home drinking.

No stagnation, but a house price crash

A carefully-reasoned post by "Alice Cook" on UK Housing Bubble concludes that house prices will drop 25% quickly (by the end of next year).

The alternative (house prices stagnate, allowing inflation to achieve the same result more slowly) has become unsustainable because of fears respecting the stability of the banks.

Drink is the curse of the post-working classes

The main change in the structure of capital during this century has been the relative stagnation of industrial capital and the growth of the service sector of the economy. This trend, which has been most marked in the south of England, has had consequences for inner city working class areas: de-industrialisation, mobility of labour, and post-war rehousing policies have combined to dislocate the pattern of community based upon local work and extended families and associated cultural traditions (Cohen, 1972). Population has been decanted to the New Towns, and more generally, to the suburbs, where social life has focussed upon the nuclear family, and the home is increasingly regarded as a place of leisure, recreation and consumption. It is in this context that off-licence sales have become more important. The 1961 Licensing Act relaxed restrictions on the opening of off-licences, and the 1964 Licensing Act facilitated supermarket sales. By the late 1970s, most beer was still sold in public houses, but one third of all wine and half of spirits were consumed at home (Thurman, 1981; 4).

... from Alcohol, Youth, and the State by Nicholas Dorn (RKP, 1983)

Taking on the supermarkets now would be like eradicating the Taliban. Remember how they took on the government and won easily, e.g. in 1991? So much for the rule of law.

Licensing Act 1964 - legal summary
2003 Licensing Act - summary

On the coarsening of British culture

"On what little things does happiness depend!" wrote Oscar Wilde in the Nightingale and the Rose. He was referring to the heartbreak endured by a student who needed to get a red rose to impress a professor's daughter. Actually it turned out that the professor's daughter was a bloody idiot and didn't deserve the red rose that was only secured through the agonising death of a lovely nightingale; he should've just written a request for fellatio on the back of a bus ticket and stuck it to her forehead - and insisted on the return of the ticket.

Thus Russell Brand, in the Guardian newspaper. His louche autobiography is entitled "My Booky Wook", though for some reason he doesn't apply the same baby-linguistic titling approach to his blog or website ("My Blogy... no! No! Career death!"). For there are things these jokers take very, very seriously: banknotes.

The Teflon coating on his deadly bullets of vulgarity is a trifling pretension to verbal and literary sophistication. And it's happening all around, and so very well rewarded.

Of course, the next generation is past TV. So what are your children playing on the Internet? Here's some of the games I've seen ten-year-olds chuckling at in the last fortnight:

Stair Fall
The Torture Game
The Last Stand 2

And as fast as you block these entertainments, new routes to them appear via new game compendium sites. And more and more new games, most of them free of charge.

But the work of psychic corruption must proceed, so we must be inoculated against notions of censorship by tendentious TV biopics of well-meaning moral campaigners like Mary Whitehouse, who was of course not nearly so posh, sophisticated, well-breeched and well-connected as the moguls she took on. So smart are we that she is to be condemned as much for her eyewear as for her lower-middle-class status and dowdy profession (schoolteaching - art and sex education).

I think we must wait for the University rebels of the late Sixties to retire or die before we can start the salvage operation.

In the paper shop

6.30 a.m. today. An elderly man is poring over the pink Lottery result printout in the newsagent's. He's had four numbers come up.

"Drinks are on you, then," I say.

"I've spent £35,000 since the Lottery started, and had five back," he says.

He'd come to the shop at six, having forgotten that it opens at half-past. He thinks he's in the early stages of Alzheimer's.

__________________________________

Here's some lines of comment that could come out of this, but you can easily expand them yourself, I'm sure:

• Mathematics - the Lottery gives back 45% in prizes, but averaging-out could take forever
• What is a Government doing, making gambling so easy and readily available (and it started under the Tories)?
• How much would this man have had, if he'd saved £208 per month since 1994?
• Now that insurance salesmen have disappeared, what has happened to savings among the C2/D classes? Has financial consumer protection (after the pensions mis-selling compensation and regulation bonanza) indirectly impoverished them and made them more dependent on the State?

I expect you can come up with more, and better.

And then there's drink, from allowing supermarkets to sell it along with your groceries, to 24-hour booze licensing.

Are misguided arguments for liberty being used to enslave people to their weaknesses? Should heavily-capitalised businesses be allowed to batten on those flaws?

Oil: back to the Seventies

Found on InflationData.com

Unbidden, The Time Warp came to me (though I had thought the word "shimmy" appeared in the lyrics). And, of course, as usual, the Brits manage to get themselves into a worse pickle:

Found on Mish's.