You may recall that a couple of weeks ago Buckfast Tonic Wine was fingered as being a major cause of violence in Strathclyde, Scotland. I thought I had dealt with these hollow accusations quite well, but it seems that the monks who brew this euphemistic wine are now standing up for themselves.

They make some very good points, some of which I covered. Buckfast accounts for just 0.5% of alcoholic drinks sold in Scotland (1% in Strathclyde), so it can hardly be the main catalyst for alcohol-fuelled violence. The monks statement also says:

What is clear is that there are serious, social problems in some parts of Scotland and that in some of these parts there are people who abuse alcoholic drinks, including Buckfast Tonic Wine.

Deplorable as these are, it is hard to see how one product with only a small percentage of the market can be held responsible for all the social ills of such an area.

This seems a rather rapid leap of logic. Has anyone considered that the misuse of this wine by some could be seen as a symptom rather than a cause of such problems?

Much as it pains me to agree with theists, I have to say, “Well said, the Buckfast monks”. They are completely right and the bogus Buckfast problem has been made up by the deranged neo-prohibitionists and their cronies in the media.

This doesn’t stop some jumped up fart of a Scottish Labour MEP, Catherine Stihler, from sticking her nose in where it is not wanted by saying that alcoholic drinks that contain caffeine, like Buckfast, should be banned. She said, "Many consumers are unaware of the damage they are doing to their bodies." What a load of old twaddle. She is clearly part of the neo-pro fun-hating fringe that think anything entertaining is by definition bad and should be banned by the big state that looks after us because we cannot be trusted to look after ourselves.

People like Ms. Stihler really wind me up. They make me want to get blind drunk on Buckfast and threaten them with an empty bottle. Not that I would, of course, I have a very healthy relationship with alcohol that rarely involves getting blind drunk. Mind you, if it would irritate Ms. Stihler even slightly then it would be worth getting blind drunk and have a whale of a time doing so.

When it comes to Buckfast creating a serious problem in Scotland all that is left to be said is, “Move along, please, there is nothing to see here.” Well, I suppose you can look at Buckfast Abbey, which is quite baroque:

I Tweeted about the ‘terrible’ problems that Buckfast Tonic Wine (and it is really wine in a euphemistic sense) seems to be causing in Scotland as reported on the BBC News website a bit earlier and in a documentary on BBC Scotland to be broadcast later today. We need to look at this is a bit more carefully.

Just about all we are told is that in the three years between 2006 and 2009 Strathclyde police reports specifically mention Buckfast Tonic Wine a total of 5638 times, 450 of which are violent crimes including 114 instances of Buckfast bottles being used as weapons.

However, a look at Strathclyde police crime statistics show that 1.33 million crimes were reported during this period, of which 34497 were violent. This means that Buckfast was mentioned in 0.43% of the total crimes reported on or 1.3% if you specifically look at violent crime. Buckfast bottles used as weapons in these violent crimes account for 0.33% of the total amount.

Furthermore, the information presented is totally meaningless as they don’t give comparisons of other kinds of alcohol being mentioned in crime reports. Consequently, we don’t really know about the over-representation of Buckfast as crime-fuel.

One might also wonder whether the following points might cast any further doubt on the statistical significance of the findings of the BBC’s fearless investigative journalists.

• It is one of the most deprived areas in the UK.
• Buckfast accounts of 1% total alcohol consumption in the area.
• Buckfast has long been the drink associated with the Scottish ‘Ned’ culture; ‘chavs’ as we now call them in England.
• Crime rates for young, poor, under-educated men are a lot higher than in the rest of the population.
• If Buckfast was to be magically removed from the shop shelves, it doesn’t take the sharpest tool in the box to realise its consumers would not suddenly realise the error of their ways and switch to carrot juice with wheatgrass extract, but rather switch to another iconic, cheap, high-alcohol drink. In five years time we would, no doubt, have the BBC preaching to us the evils of its chav-friendly replacement, no matter what it was.

I could go on, but I think I have wasted enough time on this sloppy piece of journalism which is unusually misleading and vacuous even by the generally laughable standards of the neo-prohibitionist cronies in the media.

Much better than this kind of drivelly old toss that the BBC report is the Daily Mash’s article on drinking in Scotland. I think it is better to laugh than be worried by the scare-mongering rubbish that is constantly forced down our throats.

My Tweets have mentioned Pete Brown’s excellent series of articles which demolish a lot of lies told by those who wish to brow-beat us into not drinking. I thought they were so good and worth reading that I’d write a quick blog post to praise them more fully and hopefully bring them to the attention of a few more people.

It is very easy to fall for some of the neo-prohibitionist publications, they are invariably given uncritical coverage in the popular media. When you actually read things like the recent Health Select Committee report on alcohol you find they are filled with bogus statistics, unfounded assertions and contradictory conclusions. For example, we are so often told that alcohol consumption is increasing in teenagers; the HSC report repeats this ‘fact’. Very rarely does this statement come with any supporting data. If we look for some hard evidence about teenage drinking we can go to the Office of National Statistics; it has the following to say about 11-15 year olds’ consumption of booze:

In 2006, 45% of pupils said they had never had a proper alcoholic drink (a whole drink and not just a sip), an increase compared to 39% in 2001

In 2007, 20% reported drinking alcohol in the week prior to interview, down from 26% in 2001

So far from teenagers drinking more their alcohol consumption is actually falling. How often does that get reported? I don’t recall any newspaper or television news program mentioning this when another scare-mongering piece of toss repeats that same old lie.

Pete Brown’s latest blog post mentions this and examines more fully the suggestion that alcohol advertising encourages children to drink. He reports on the studies done that have started from the assumption that advertising has this result. Unsurprisingly, neither study could convincingly show alcohol advertising does influence children significantly when it comes to alcohol consumption, even though the studies’ authors wanted this conclusion. These studies were mentioned in the HSC report, but because they didn’t give the results the HSC wanted they tried a different way of demonstrating that advertising affects children.

The HSC’s weaselling strategy is to say that advertising makes children aware of alcohol. It is manifest drivel to equate awareness of something with a desire to use it. Unsurprisingly, the HSC give no hard data that awareness of alcohol leads to consumption of it by children, but this is the conclusion they draw based on ‘expert testimony’ from members of the anti-drink lobby. These experts are apparently trusted solely because they disagree with experts from the drinks and advertising industry.

Rules about alcohol advertising are incredibly strict in the UK; it is duplicitous to say alcohol adverts target children when the law already prevents them from doing so (no one under 25 can appear in an alcohol advert, drinking to excess cannot be mentioned and adverts cannot claim that booze brings social or material success). The only way drink advert regulation could get any stricter, as Pete Brown points out, would be if they were totally banned.

I hope Pete Brown does not mind me distilling his latest post here. I do so to draw attention to his excellent work and hopefully get some people to read more of his articles on the neo-prohibitionist agenda. If we know how they are mendacious we can answer back when they try to infringe our liberties.

Get over to http://petebrown.blogspot.com/ now, read his posts and start being appalled by the lies told in order to demonise what is a healthy and cultural experience for the vast majority of us.