You know you're a raving authoritarian prick when even the Greens say you're being alarmist.
The Liberal Democrat justice spokesman, Robert Brown, has put down a motion attacking the new Tokyo* beer, believed to be the strongest beer in the world, produced by the Aberdeenshire-based brewery BrewDog.
Mr Brown called the beer's 18.2 per cent alcohol level "reprehensible in a society where the medical evidence shows that, across all age groups and socio-economic categories, individuals are drinking too much alcohol".
Green MSP Patrick Harvie suggested his Liberal Democrat opponent was missing the point on Scotland's problem with booze.
"I doubt we'll see fans of Buckfast switching to niche micro-brewery beers like this, and Robert Brown should therefore simply calm down," he said.
There is something rather disturbing about seeing the Dr Jekyll Liberals being subsumed by the Mr Hyde Social Democrat side of the Lib Dems.
As Tom Papworth succinctly observed at Liberal Vision a couple of days ago.
We Liberal Democrats do love a good banning. This is odd for a party that professes liberalism, a belief that individuals should be free to pursue their own ends as they see fit; a philosophy that trusts people to make choices for themselves.
Quite. Profess liberalism they may well do. Act in a liberal manner they certainly don't. They are almost indistinguishable from New Labour now and getting more proscriptive by the day, despite the fact that their poll ratings are showing no improvement as a result.
Good luck to Liberal and Progressive Vision, but with hysterical numbnuts like Robert Brown regularly bouncing up and down in outrage at irrelevances, they have their work cut out.
7 comments:
On some things the Lib Dems are very good but, despite my best efforts, many in the party still feel the need for bans and overly prescriptive/proscriptive behaviour to tackle the traditional "evils" of booze, fags, fatty food and a lack of exercise.
Attacking this sort of beer does sound pretty ludicrous. Probably tastes foul anyway.
What has happened is that in an attempt to establish a niche for itself the party attracted every sort of nutter with their hand out from eco-fascists who insisted the party commit to blackouts & a return to the Middle Ages to the genuine article who knowingly supported ethnic cleansing, genocide, the sexual enslavement of childrenn & the dissection of living people for their organs in Kosovo.
I can say without fear of contradiction that it is officially imposssible to be a genuine liberal in the party because being one was the official reason why Obersturmbanner Brown got me expelled.
These asshole 'rent a liberal' types are making me turn to drink, where can I buy 24 bottles? My Giro's due! (Ah, the good old days of the Giro instead of bank accounts eh.)
I saw this through the haze that is Sunday morning being discussed on some BBC1 drivel that is supposed to pass for a debate programme. I don't know what it's called but it's hosted by that arch-spermsucker Nicky Campbell so you can probably guess the level they manage to attain (please note that it's on after the Andrew Marr show, but before I can drag myself into work. Or even work out what the remote control looks like for that matter).
To provide a bit of rationality to the debate they had some woman on there whose daughter had died due to alcohol. Guess what she spouted?
However, also present was a chap from the company actually making the beer who explained that it would cost ten pounds for 330ml bottles, be sold in specialist beer shops (mostly exports I believe) and, here's the bit I liked, they were only brewing a few hundred of them.
Obviously, as I don't think that many people could argue with this, the discussion immediately switched to the low cost of alcohol and the chiiilldren drinking in the streets yadda yadda yadda..
If only someone had simply asked that mother whether she reckoned that her daughter would have been first in line for one of those bottles, assuming she could locate one, or whether she'd have been down the park with her regular bottle of meths then I could have spent five more minutes of my life feeling sorry for myself instead of getting really pissed off with a bunch of loudmouth fucking idiots who are so anally retentive that they can't figure out that the rest of us want to live our lives with some sort of freedom.
To get someone suffering from the Sunday morning haze angry before they've even got to work just goes to show how despicable these puritanical arse-bandits can be..
It's worth reading this post on Pete Brown's blog where he actually tastes Tokyo* - something I doubt any of its critics have done.
"The idea of anyone binge drinking a bottle of this beer, of knocking it back quickly, is utterly absurd. I defy anyone to drink a bottle in under an hour. You actually don't want a full bottle of it. The argument about it containing more units than your recommended daily guideline is no more valid than it would be with a bottle of spirits."
Of course the Liberals were the party of "temperance" back in the days of Gladstone, so there's nothing really new there.
It's not even the strongest beer in the world, that's Utopias at around 27%
Costigan: You're one of the good ones (also Charlotte G & Mark L), shame there aren't more.
Neil: Why does that sadden whilst simultaneously not being a surprise?
Curmudgeon: Interesting read, that. Thanks for posting. :-)
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