Catch ‘em Young
..and they are yours for life! So somebody once said, or words to that effect.
I was struck by this comment on another blog:
"What we have at the moment is a state that takes a very laissez faire approach to the markets and an increasingly authoritarian approach to the general public. This should be the other way round."
Kable reported before Christmas that the government will be offering young Londoners cut-price ID cards from early this year. But why would anyone want one? £30 is a lot of money for a student, who probably can’t afford to buy cigarettes and alcohol anyway. But the first young person to take up the offer has arrived – and is a 21 year old from Wanstead. Does he realise that once you’ve got one these you can’t NOT have one. And if you don’t inform the Stasi authorities of any changes you can get fined £1,000. If your Passport expires and you don’t need another one you just don’t renew it – period. But with these babies you are signed up for life – unless of course someone comes along and changes the rules or scraps them.
And why Oh why do the authorities take such a heavy handed, nanny state approach to the sale of cigarettes and alcohol in the first place. Sixteen year olds can leave school, get a job, pay tax, get married and have children. But they can’t buy the Champagne to toast their union – and they can’t vote. Maybe that’s it? They can’t vote so the politicians don’t care about what they want, and bow to the grumpies [who do vote] and who complain about youths hanging about on street corners [because they are not allowed in pubs] socialising with their peer group in exactly the same way that the grumpies do when queuing up for their pension outside the Post Office in Barkingside High Street and blocking the pavement.
Redbridge Council is about to get tough. But as Knowsie points out, it is completely the wrong approach. We should be teaching our young children about alcohol so that they learn how to use it responsibly as they grow up. They don’t just suddenly wake up one morning as an adult. It is a process not an event.
Tim Martin in the Morning Advertiser:
Furthermore, the imperial hypocrisy does not end there. All the participants with teenage children admitted, in turn, that they allowed their children to use pubs from 15 or 16, and preferred, as common sense would dictate, the relatively supervised atmosphere of pubs, combined with the mixed age groups found in pubs, to the unpredictable and relatively unsupervised teenage party circuit.It’s the same old story. The government have to be seen to be doing something and anything will do, regardless of whether it works or not. As always the symptoms and not the cause are the target of those politicians whose primary concern is being re-elected. It doesn’t matter that the many have to suffer the consequences of their failure.
We need to get back to the situation of teenagers drinking with their parents and grandparents, which I first did along with many others, at the age of about 15, rather than in the teenage ghettos created by parties and the crackdown on pubs.

















