One of the problems of a state owned health service is that the state thinks that it owns your health.
The Balance North East campaign this week launched a campaign to turn the clock back when alcohol was so expensive that wine was something that only the middle-classes aspired to enjoy.
Balance director Colin Shevills said: “Our region is drinking too much from an early age driven by alcohol which is too affordable, too available and too heavily promoted.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-15997695
Balance, which was set up under the old Labour regime, reflects that administration’s belief that people don’t have any business making decisions for themselves, and they should be prevented from making harmful choices rather than being allowed to suffer their consequences… the example that they give of the kind of person they want to protect is Joanne Patterson, 41, from Sunderland, who was….
diagnosed with cirrhosis and chronic liver disease two years ago. She had been drinking three bottles of wine, as well as lager, every day.
She now has to take 90 to 100 tablets a week and had spent 300 days in hospital in the past two years.
She said: “What’s to say it’s not going to happen to anyone else, because I never thought I would get this much damage from drinking.
“But I have done and it’s irreversible damage and I have to take tablets for the rest of my life. My liver could fail at any time.”
Certainly there are serious problems with children and drink in the North East and there should be some education around these issues, but you do have to wonder what kind of education could get through to someone so stupid that they don’t realise that drinking three bottles of wine a day and topping it off with lager is going to do you serious damage? The way you felt in the morning would be some indication…. However, Balance’s solution is to make Alcoholic drink more expensive (which was a popular theme in the old administration). All this is likely to do is increase the number of illegal stills that are growing up and push people like Joanne on to heroin instead of alcohol. And anyway, in other countries where alcohol is cheap, their children are not killing themselves with lager, so why in the North East of England?
Educationally, the whole North East region is either below national average or well below national average and truancy is also high.
The one thing which could stop the North East having such terrible problems with its young people is if it gets over the idea that the ship building and manufacturing jobs lost to the far east in the 1970s are ever going to come back to that region. For generations parents in the North East have been raising children in the belief that the government will supply subsidised manual and semi-skilled jobs for them. This has not happened in nearly 30 years and it is time that these parents put aside the socialist fantasies of full employment for the unskilled and realise that in today’s job market, it’s education that matters. If parents make sure their children go to school and learn something while they are there, then maybe children will have a real incentive not to destroy their lives with alcohol.
