Hogarth's Gin Lane

I like a drink, especially good wine. I recently gave up alcohol for ten days after returning from Italy, an annual penance that I feel does me good. I find alcohol a relaxant, makes me feel convivial and an instant endorphin producer. And I’d better own up to the fact that I once owned half of a brewery and was a significant shareholder in a gin distillery. (You could say I live on gin). So I’m sympathetic to the vast majority of people who also enjoy it and recognize what a valuable role it can play in society. But we have to face facts. Drinking to excess in Britain has risen in the past 50 years. As the price has gone down drinking to excess has gone up. When the culture of heavy drinking is acceptable, as it is among many sections of society, then price is the key determinant on whether someone will drink to excess. The price of beer and cider has fallen by about 30 per cent in real terms since 1990, while wine and spirits have fallen by about 20 per cent. As earnings have risen, alcohol is within everyone’s reach, less than a pound now for a bottle of Eurofizz lager or cheap cider bought at below cost from supermarkets selling as a loss leader.

As Sir Liam Donaldson, the former Chief Medical Officer said last year, cheap alcohol is “killing us as never before”. He said that the nation was blighted by “passive drinking”, with innocent bystanders the collateral damage of drunk drivers, domestic violence and antisocial behaviour. Hospital admissions involving people with an alcohol-related disease are up 69 per cent since 2003 and will soon reach a million annually. Liver disease shows a fivefold increase in the under-65s in the past 30 years and almost all of this increased morbidity is due to alcohol.

Donaldson wanted to introduce a minimum price of 50p a unit of alcohol, the immediate benefit would be 3,393 fewer deaths each year, 97,900 fewer hospital admissions and 45,800 fewer crimes. The Government rejected it, and I do not have much hope that the Coalition will face up to the powerful antipathetic lobbies of the drinks industry. The solution is staring us in the face as it did in the 18^th century when the effect of gin on the working population was devastating.

In 1729 Parliament increased the tax on gin and this led to ill feeling in the working classes and ultimately to the gin riots . (Is this what the Government fears?) The government responded by reducing duties and penalties, claiming that moderate measures would be easier to enforce.  But Gin drinking continued to be a problem and by the 1740s the British were consuming 8,000,000 gallons a year. In 1751 the government took action and greatly increased duties on gin. The sale by distillers and shopkeepers was strictly controlled and these measures successfully reduced the consumption of gin in Britain.

Put the price of alcohol up to where it was twenty years ago and the problem would more or less be solved. Changing culture will take far too long, we are northern Europeans not southern European in our attitudes to drink. Someone will tell me that putting the price up would encourage smuggling (true) and that we can’t be so out of kilter with the rest of Europe. Why not? Even a small fiscal change would help us tackle the problem.

Lady Deech mentioned the rumours that are flying around in one of her blogs so I thought I’d keep you up to date about what’s happening. During a debate on reform of the House of Lords, on Tuesday 29 June, Lord Strathclyde announced he would be setting up a Leaders’ Group to investigate the options for Members to permanently leave the House of Lords. A Leader’s Group meets informally and does not have the powers of a Select Committee but can make recommendations for consideration.

At present neither life peers nor elected hereditary peers are able to retire or disclaim their seat in the House; only the Bishops and Archbishops retire at a fixed age of 70. The new Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 allows for peers who are not deemed to be resident, ordinarily resident and domiciled (ROD) to terminate their membership of the House of Lords if they wish to maintain their non resident status

The group, chaired by Lord Hunt of Wirral and including representation from all sides of the Lords, will identify options that would allow Members to leave or retire from the House of Lords. I am the crossbench member of the group, which has begun its work. We will be meeting during recess so as to produce some options for the House to consider in the autumn.

Members can at present take Leave of Absence for the remainder of the Parliament, some do when they are ill or too frail to attend. Many others simply do not turn up. Out of nearly 800 members now perhaps half are not regular attendees and perhaps 100 or so never appear (they’re cheap though!) The average age of peers is 68, meaning that we are an aged house and some would say too aged. But a compulsory retirement age is being phased out for the rest of society; it would seem strange to introduce one in the Lords.

There have been many attempts to introduce a retirement possibility recently, notably via David Steel’s recurrent Private Members Bills on constitutional reform, which by the way garnered massive support from backbenchers of all sides of the House.

All ideas gratefully received but no jokes please, I’ve heard them all already.

I’ve always had a soft spot for David Hunt, who as a junior minister in the department of local governemnt back in 89-90 and was the poor minister responsible for trying to find ways to make the Poll Tax more palatable. A colleague and I working in mental health were delighted when he accepted our arguments that people with serious long term mental health problems like dementia should not pay poll tax on the basis thay could not properly exercise choice about how it was to be spent. To our surprise (and I suspect to the deep irritation of the Department of Health, who feared it would be unworkable), I suspect he was keen on anything that made the  tax look more human, he accepted our arguments and while the Poll Tax died, the exemptions live on in a number of different kinds of exemptions from council tax . So people with mental health problems who are exempt from council tax have cause to be grateful to Lord Hunt.

The principle behind a graduate tax is that students should be able to decide what to study and where without worrying about the different costs involved and after graduation they should be able to work at their chosen field without worrying about having to pay back debts quickly. Those who are subsequently able to contribute more towards their education will do so while those that are unable will not.

On the face of it this is attractive, but it has a serious drawback for universities. Many people feel uneasy about the obvious alternative, which is to move to a market in fees where certain universities cost considerably more than others. Ignoring the fact that certain universities do indeed cost more than others to run and there is considerable difference between the quality of one course and another. But for me it is an inequitable centralist solution with the following disadvantages.

a)  It breaks the link between the individual and the institution they attend. The centralist solution provides no guarantee that the money raised centrally would go to the institutions most valued by students. It perpetuates higher education institutions’ dependence on the state instead of freeing them from it. What is more, for many years until the graduate tax kicked in, universities would be left with debt financing and uncertainty.  The positive benefit of top-up fees, that is an increasingly assertive attitude from students demanding better quality teaching, would be lost.

b)  The graduate tax proposal would make it harder to create the market in competition and choice that needs to emerge in higher education. More universities need to reposition themselves on vocational and professional teaching. They will only do this if the fees they can charge concentrate their minds on their real strengths and potential.

We moved part way to a USA type university system by deciding that a very high proportion of young people should go to university, but we failed to understand that a US student can apply to the university of his choice knowing that his place will be allocated blind with regard to his personal family wealth. Fees will be assessed on his/his parents’ wealth (as grants used to be here) and that if he is unable to pay a bursary system will meet the full cost. Universities are not all the same and we need to encourage students to discriminate more between them just as employers in reality do now. A graduate tax won’t solve this problem.

Fini’s astute manoeuvre (or I think it is) puts him in a position to damage Berlusconi his former ally but it leaves Italian politics in a less stable situation than ever. Berlusconi had been trying to oust Fini for months, particularly as Fini seems to have been moving towards the centre and away from his almost fascist position. It’s a bit like watching the humanization of Michael Portillo after the 1987 election; I was glad but not sure if it was believable. Fini wants Berlusconi to deal with his allies’ alleged corruption and introduce more democratic systems into the PdL. Fat chance I say….

There is a great new book about the real Berlusconi by Charles Young, called ‘Impunity’; I recommend it to anyone who worries about the petty corruptions of UK political life. Young’s book is a searing indictment of the Italian electorate’s failure to remove a profoundly damaged politician who has presided over the worst economic decline in Italy’s history since the war.

Fini managed to weaken a ‘bavaglio’ law ie a gagging law, dear to the prime minister’s heart, that would have stopped the publication of eavesdropped transcripts, which in the past have been damaging to Berlusconi. By most estimates the government is now at least seven seats short of a majority.

The current situation probably won’t last. Berlusconi should be able to secure the backing of smaller parties of whom there are dozens, by offering jobs and inducements in the time honoured fashion.

The decision as to when to call an election lies in the hands of the Head of State President Giorgio Napolitano, but at the weekend, Berlusconi and his other ally, Umberto Bossi of the separatist Northern League, (Lega Nord) were working hard to rule that out.

But the sun is shining here in Tuscany; Italians retains on the surface a wonderful way of life. Look closely and you see that young people have no jobs, the price of food seems increasingly high, restaurants are not full and times are tough. Berlusconi is a terrible failure and though he has passed some austerity measures I know no-one who believes he can implement them. How can a man with so many accusations of tax evasion ever convince a nation to pay their dues?

But badgers are vermin. They are not an endangered species. The population of badgers is thought to have increased by 70% or more in the past twenty years and no-one now disputes that they carry the TB which passes to cattle. There isn’t much doubt that a total extermination of badgers over a wide area, combined with restriction of movement of cattle and better biosecurity on farms would help eradicate the destructive TB in cattle. Cattle movement from infected areas to clean farms is by far the best predictor of bovine TB distribution on a national level so farmers have a job to do to ensure movements are controlled.

Culling of badgers in the vicinity of recent TB outbreaks in cattle has failed to reduce the overall incidence of cattle TB. Data from a large-scale study conducted in 1998–2005 showed that badgers collected on localized culls had an elevated prevalence of Mycobacterium bovis, the causative agent of bovine TB but the conclusion is that reduction in badger numbers won’t do the trick, you need total removal of the badger population over a wide area and so far no-one has managed to achieve that for practical reasons. We probably need to develop a means to stop badgers breeding, a contraceptive pill for badgers? I would support a cull in Wales and anywhere else if we could be absolutely sure it would be total.

But there is some modest comfort to be taken from the government investment in developing a TB cattle vaccine, which as Lord Krebs said in his report in 1997 “is the best prospect for control of TB in the British herd”. Total investment (since 1998) in vaccine development reached more than £17.8 million by the end of March 2008. Over £5.5 million was invested in cattle and badger vaccine research in 2007/2008. Real progress has been made. Testing candidate vaccines in naturally infected cattle and badgers, and developing novel vaccine delivery systems, is underway. Meanwhile, badger huggers can be as sentimental  as they like and farmers will remain angry.

Lord German

Baroness Benjamin

Baroness Ritchie

This last two days we’ve been meeting in the Chamber 15 minutes early to accommodate the influx of new peers. Why we continue to have new people joining us when one of the key issues is how to reduce the size of the Chamber is something of a puzzle but they keep coming! The six new peers are all clearly party  appointments intended to do regular work, certainly they come from a cross section of interesting backgrounds, they demonstrate the growing diversity of the Lords. On Monday Floella Benjamin, the children’s presenter and campaigner for children rights arrived for the Lib Dems, increasing our African Carribbean contingency; Jack McConnell, formerly Scottish First Minister came in for Labour and Roy Kennedy, formerly party organiser for the Labour party arrived as Lord Kennedy of Southwark. Tuesday we welcomed Lord German from the Lib Dems in Wales, who took the oath in beautifully resonant Welsh and English too, Baroness Hussein-Ece (pronounced Edger) from the British Turkish Cypriot community who took her oath on the Koran, covering her head briefly for that part of the ceremony and finally Baroness Ritchie of Brompton, a conservative councillor from west London. My main thought as they arrived was ‘Thank Goodness they don’t a seat on the cross benches’ Still, new faces and new ideas are always welcome, I’ll be looking out to see how they fare.

Lord McConnell

Lord Kennedy of Southwark

Baroness Hussein-Ece

Lord Hill of Oareford

This is the photo of Lord Hill of Oareford, the Schools Minister that I thought I’d inserted into my last post. As Jonathan Hill he was a ministerial advisor in various departments in the 1980s and 1990s (he had the reputation for being what my auntie would call ‘a head full of smarts’). He  headed up the Prime Minister John Major’s political office from 1992-94. Having now been parachuted into the new Government in the Lords he is having to find his way around the parliament and the Department of Education, remember the silly lingo and peculiar comportment of the Chamber, get a major bill (the first of the new parliament ) through the Lords before recess and at the same time accommodate a mass of detailed amendments while recalling his brief from the Bill team working on the Academies Bill.  Report so far?  ”Trying hard in his first term at School, shows talent and promise, should do well if he can keep it up”.

Education is the process by which children learn to question, test out ideas, get to grips with logic, reason and hard facts and how to be a good socially responsible citizen. The State should tolerate and respect the religious faiths of all its citizens but should surely not seek to proselytise any of them. (Yes I know we still have the established church although that matter didn’t come up at all) It’s my view that religion is for parents and religious organisations to pursue outside of school if they wish. The new Minister Lord Hill of Oareford gave a fair answer to the many points but I fear that faith schools will continue to grow. See Lord Hill below.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has recently issued a discussion paper entitled From Coercion to Cohesion: Treating Drug Dependence through Healthcare, not Punishment. http://www.idpc.net/publications/unodc-from-coercion-to-cohesion-treatment. For nearly 50 years, ever since the first UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, the UNODC has operated as the defender of the punitive approach to drug addiction as well as drug trafficking. Some 186 countries have signed up to the three UN conventions, all of which promote a criminalising philosophy. Until relatively recently, virtually all of those countries have followed the criminalising approach without question. For those of us who believe that the war on drugs is misguided and destructive both for individuals and communities, this new UNODC document is indeed a major milestone for the UN and hence for the world drug policy regime. The aim of ‘From Coercion to Cohesion’ is to promote a health-oriented approach to drug dependence but not a soft approach; more of an evidence-based realistic one. Lord Brett pointed out towards the end of the debate that UN discussion papers are a long way off policy papers and a very long way off from a change in the Convention but we have to start somewhere.

At present Europe spends something like 34 billion Euro on ‘solving’ the drug misuse problem, mostly through the police and criminal justice system. Less than 7% of the budget is spent on healthcare and no-one can say how much is spent on education; probably little. All the speakers advocated a ‘harm reduction’ approach, some of us also advocate decriminalisation of personal possession of drugs too, because there is quite a lot of evidence that some of the harms would be reduced. But that is of course a long way from legalization, where there is very little hard evidence internationally that a fully commercial and fiscal approach would not increase the personal harm that drug misuse does to individuals. People whose heads are addled through intoxication with drugs will continue to come into the criminal justice system, we need to think through how to get them into treatment and rehabilitation in a way that is attractive to them. The National Treatment Agency has had considerable success in getting drug misusers into treatment and there are some interesting pilot schemes to divert misusers from courts to special drug courts and treatment options rather than prisons. What we really need is a comprehensive approach to reducing usage of all drugs in the 10-21 yr olds who are at risk of misuse by means of accurate education, and I mean by that not scare-mongering about commonly used drugs but give accurate information about the effects of recurrent and long term use. It is skunk,  heroin, crack cocaine, powder cocaine that should be the target but also ensure better information is absorbed by kids about cannabis, ecstasy, mephedrone and other ‘party highs’ that young people try. It’s time to stop pretending that drugs can be eradicated from our society and adopt a more realistic approach to their use and abuse.

It was a constructive debate and Lord McNally’s response for the government was a very positive one. He also pledged to return for a further debate once the Government had had more time to flesh out their policy.