Last updated 13:56, Tuesday, 26 August 2008

Another nail in the coffin of pub trade.

This time it’s on “responsible drinking” and was carried out by a group of highly paid aliens employed by top consultants, KPMG.

The report has been seized upon by the media, and Government apparatchiks, who love to legislate and ban things, as a definitive statement of the binge-drinking culture, which now permeates every aspect of life in Britain today.

It is going to be used as another nail to be hammered into the coffin of the pub industry, on top of escalated tax on alcohol, the smoking ban and, a stack legislation which has beset licensees in recent years.

Forecasts of pub closures offer the gloomy scenario of 25 per cent shutting up shop in the next five years. About 30-40 are closing each week.

I used the word “aliens” earlier to describe the consultants who surveyed about 400 pubs, because it is clear to me that they have only a limited connection with the world in which most of us live in Britain, 2008.

The report describes with horror incidents of distinctly iffy behaviour in the pubs they looked at.

To the glee of the “health and wellbeing Tsars” in power, they have documented several cases of fighting, vomiting and urinating in public places.

Well – it quite took my breath away! Where have these people been living for the last 10 years?

It’s sad to have to say it, but that’s how a significant part of the population behave these days. and if they believe that this is down to licensees serving alcohol in pubs then I’m afraid that we are actually talking about aliens with the intellectual tackle of the smaller gastropods – I’ve landed reef fish with more savvy!

The whole nature of anti-social behaviour in our society is down to a lot of things, not the least being an education system which has been politicised and messed about for 40 years.

It’s down to the ineffective way in which the country is policed and the colossal amount of time a copper has to put in to make an arrest and secure a conviction. It’s down to parents who couldn’t give a pinch of piping-hot pelican pooh about bringing up their kids.

It may be, partly, about cut-price booze in supermarkets, but – it’s not about licensees behaving badly, whatever the Government is telling you!

RICHARD ELSY

Cumbria

JUDICIAL SYSTEM

Sick decision

These people who allow this have no thought and don’t care what anguish they cause to the victims of this fiend, but this is typical of the judicial system throughout Britain to release these sick perverts back into society knowing that there’s every chance they will re-offend and shatter someone else’s life.

How callous is that? Rapists and paedophiles should never be released to walk among decent people. They, like murderers, are the lowest form of human life and are of no use to the country and society.

Personally, I say they should given the death penalty. It’s a shame we haven’t got it. It is ironic, is it not, it would help save lives.

D WILKINSON

Newton Road

Carlisle

ROAD SAFETY

Unfair comparison

Let’s look at some dry statistics about the roads of Cumbria.

One person a week is killed on Cumbrian roads; roughly one person each day is seriously injured and, each day, another three or four people sustain minor injuries.

I work as a GP in Brampton and in that time three people have been killed on the streets within our quiet and picturesque town. I have lost count of the number of fatal road accidents I have attended on the roads outside Brampton.

The Eden Valley has one of the worst traffic safety records in the country.

Perhaps I am particularly angry this week because once again I have had to help extricate a young person from a road accident, strap them to a spine board and wonder if they are going to join the ranks of the dead or “just” the seriously injured.

PETER WEAVING

Brampton Medical Practice

BRITAIN’S GREATEST HERO

Churchill was tops

In my view, the late Sir Winston Churchill. He was an inspirational wartime leader against the powers of darkness in the second World War.

We owe him a lot.

ROY DICKINSON

Carlisle