Despite the cuddly picture appended to the piece, our esteemed mascot has again been snarling at fake Tory Sarah Wollaston over her absurd and illiberal minimum alcohol pricing proposals, this time at the Centre for Policy Studies website.It's becoming quite a regular event, for previous episodes see here and here.
Wollaston regurgitates the usual lame justifications - and the £20bn cost lie - including this self-defeating nonsense.
I'm backing minimum pricing because it works and would save lives without hitting those on low incomes.I think you can see the contradiction there, but our Phil explains it for those, like Wollaston, who seem to think making things more expensive doesn't affect people with not a lot of money.
Sarah tries to have the argument both ways, either the price rises are such that they will barely make a difference to the family budget, or they are large enough that they will deter people from buying alcohol and combat binge drinking. If the former is true, then why impose a nominal price rise which will only serve to exact a further toll on the family budget – given every study has shown that only extreme price rises would deter the heaviest drinkers? Or if the latter is true and alcohol would become much less affordable, then a minimum unit price is opportunistic and is going to hit those on the lowest incomes the most. Either way it simply cannot be argued that a minimum unit price would be both effective whilst at the same time being non-regressive - and I maintain it would be neither!Well, quite.
You can read both sides of the debate, along with rebuttals, here, with comments welcome. And if you're on Facebook, you might like to back our guy up in this poll.
