Though Cowards Flinch

The government’s SEN green paper is as can be expected: full of waffle offering choice in services instead of pursuing child inclusion, offering up horror stories of a sector in lieu of joined-up thinking without dealing with the issues at hand, and offering the olive branch of personalised budgets.

Since when did Big Society become a veil for vague policy? Or has it always been this way?

One of the contentious subjects regarding statements for children with learning difficulties is that it stigmatises them early on in their development. And yet in this latest green paper less emphasis is being put upon integrating children into mainstream education and challenging the negative perception of SEN.

In fact one of the bargaining chips for increasing the independence of children’s assessments from councils, conveniently at a time when public sector jobs are being struck off without a private sector able to fill the gap, is allowing parents and communities to set up special free schools.

It’s unclear at this time how Michael Gove has planned to deal with the matter of social exclusion when allowing the permission of parent-led schools.

Joined-up thinking has been held by the government as a way of condensing the assessment process of a child, reducing the amount of time it takes to address a pupil’s learning difficulties. The benefits of the single assessment is that it will reduce repetition and cut down bureaucracy, however extra cautionary measures need to be in place to ensure no child falls through the net.

What is disconcerting about the green paper is that it has been informed by “Ofsted’s evaluation of SEN support, published last September, which said that thousands of children are wrongly labelled as having SEN.” The scare stories about children being put on statements because they have food allergies are so few as to be regarded purely as a matter for general teaching competency. The criteria for labelling a child as having special educational needs are quite clear, and every measure should be taken to ensure assessments are rigorous and followed to the letter.

What changes to the assessment process should not do is allow for the opinion that special educational needs are attached to too many children or used as a perverse incentive for schools to receive more money.

The argument that the label is applied to too many children has been had many times before.

The Warnock report (Baroness Warnock) for the department of education and science (DES)had been reflected in the Education Act of 1981. The most prominent feature of the report to feature in the Act was the recommendation to abolish the ten statutory categories of handicap which had encompassed special educational needs since the 1944 Education Act.

Those categories were blind, partially sighted, deaf, partially hearing, educationally subnormal, epileptic, maladjusted, physically handicapped, speech defect, and delicate, and only applied to 2% of school aged children.

The Act went on to criticise the lack in identifying solutions to children with special educational needs, and though not addressing the exact number of children who qualified, a DES circular 8/81 accepted that up to 20% of children of school attending age can be regarded as having special educational needs (p.9, Croll and Moses, Special needs in the primary school: one in five?)

What had developed with further enquiries and scientific research was that children who needed a special education made up a larger amount of the population than originally thought, when only appealing to physical disabilities and not emotional.

The argument that was to emerge, and linger in the minds of many educationalists, was whether children with special educational needs could be educated in the same setting as other children.

The Daily Mail was one of the papers who viewed Mary Warnock with suspicion, referring to her as having a “monstrous ego” that has helped destroy our moral and social heritage, for her work on special needs, embryo research and support for euthanasia.

But, as Mike Baker in 2005, retorted:

The Daily Mail derided her as a “monstrous ego” who had established the principle that all children, however disabled, “should be taught in mainstream schools”.

Yet she has never said all children should be taught in mainstream schools. Her Committee of Inquiry, and the subsequent legislation, said that provision should be in the mainstream “wherever possible”.

Warnock negated the view of some (even many schools and school leaders) that children with special educational needs were unable to be educated. Further, it predicted the rise in children who could be identified as having special educational needs (in the immediate aftermath of the report the percentage went from 2% to 20%), which, as with many stigmas in society, was not something that didn’t exist before, but the way in which experts have defined it, and the measures with which they judge special needs, has changed.

Isolating everyone who could be identified as having special educational needs would dilute schools and build barriers between people, that wouldn’t be beneficial for anyone in the long term.

Not helping matters much was Warnock’s decision to make a u-turn on her report in the 70s, saying instead that more, not fewer, special schools should be set up.

Today the argument has been raised once more. The reality is that children’s learning can be helped through educational integration, not social exclusion, though the green paper looks less concerned with trying to amend that problem. The other issue has to do with how assessments are conducted. Erroneous assessment is not the same as having too many children labelled with SEN, but inevitably the SEN sceptics in the right wing press will try to angle news of this towards the latter.

The green paper is really an exercise in BS clap, but it also fails to address major problems such as exclusion. The policy recommendations are unextraordinary and conclusions wide of the mark.

In March last year the question on everybody’s lips was: Did Hague know about Lord Ashcroft’s tax status? He said not. Then later he admitted he did, and we waited for the statement of his sacking. Nothing. Overlooked by Cameron whose compassionate conservativism begins and ends in his own cabinet.

Michael Spencer was appointed by Cameron as Tory treasurer to incentivise more small donations of £50,000, and shed the party of Ashcroft’s influence. It didn’t help. It was revealed, unsurprisingly that 50% of the Tory’s funds came from the city; £4m from David “Spotty” Rowland, £1.9m from Stanley Fink, £485,000 from George Magan. So much for small donations.

But Hague could sleep at night, Ashcroft had gone.

But now he is in the doghouse yet again.

First he made the government look foolish by repeating the unsubstantiable claim that Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela.

Then amid all the media attention on Cameron’s trip to the Middle East with arms dealers, and the Mirror story that the wife of an ex-Middle East arms dealer, old chum of Jonathan Aitken, had donated £300,000 to the Tories, David Cameron has to get up and apologise for the delays to the Government’s efforts to rescue British nationals stranded in Libya.

James Forsyth for the Mail has today said the “Government has resembled little more than a budget airline”.

Perhaps EasyJet?

WalesOnline wondered recently:

… whether [Hague's] unlucky or whether there is some flaw in that superbly functioning mental apparatus of his when it has to connect with the real world?

And that’s the clincher. When people are angry, you can cover your head for a while until everyone stops noticing. But when people feel sorry for you, that’s when you’re in trouble.

William Hague should be sacked.

The nuts of David Cameron’s speech is as follows: it was badly delivered by the Prime Minister; it used vacuous terms no-one is familiar with like muscular liberalism; and though it chimed with things he has previously said, perhaps it was an error to deliver a speech addressing political and extreme Islam, in Germany, on the same day as the English Defence League marched in Luton.

Many bloggers and writers have been quick to point out that Cameron’s speech was ill-informed. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown for example said:

“Many of us Muslims would be with David Cameron if his speech hadn’t shown him to be selective, hypocritical, calculating, woefully indifferent to Muslim victims of relentless racism and chauvinism. He was speaking the words of white extremists but in posh.”

An Independent leader article explained that though the PM was spoilt for choice as to where he could’ve delivered a speech of national interest – Luton, Bradford, Birmingham, London – instead he chose Munich, which for Indy editors seemed “especially odd … since Germany is going through a spasm of intolerance towards its ethnic minority communities at the moment.”

Cameron’s use of the word liberal concerned others. Victoria Williams at Labour Uncut wondered if by “liberal” Cameron meant “forcing your beliefs onto others and excluding them from society if they disagree”.

However none of these examples really get to why Cameron was flawed in his actual sentiments. Moreover they seem less inclined to engage with how we oppose all forms of segregation and extremism, while being tolerant and multicultural without being culturally relativist.

Appealing to a sense of (muscular liberal) Britishness – which John Milbank yesterday noted for sounding far too ‘Cleggian’ and ‘Osbornite’ – was one notable error of Cameron’s. Most people oppose extremist tendencies of any stripe, but do so with a set of tangible ideas, which “Britishness” is not. Instead it is a term which can be twisted and turned into whatever meaning one wishes. Ideas which Cameron was quite happy to promote – universal human rights for everybody including women and people of other faiths; equality of all before the law; democracy and the right of people to elect their own government – are formed through political appeals to freedom and prosperity for all, border markings are irrelevant here, and serve only to trivialise.

There is nothing contradictory about multiculturalism and integration, but Cameron – if he was any kind of ideas man, transcending the Conservative Party’s recent past of patriotism for its own sake – ought to have spent less time trying to work out what Britishness means and reject what Nick Johnson, author of a recent Fabian Society report on integration, calls the “narrow conservatism that erodes diversity into a monolithic whole.”

Credit where it is due, Cameron does understand that diversity ought not to be forced, and individuals in a society should not be tenuously pigeon-holed in what he rightly referred to as “state multiculturalism” (though it’s fair game to ask what Cameron imagines can replace it?).

Finally the criticism levelled at Cameron’s speech that it was propaganda for the EDL (which Sadiq Khan accused the PM of) is way off the mark. The impetus here should be for leftist groups and anti-extremist movements who rally against the far right to make their opposition to fundamentalist Islam more vocal, ruining any opportunity the EDL have of saying Mr Cameron is talking their language. To be sure, nothing Cameron said on extremism in some communities should be to the contrary of what the left fights for, and yet instead of engaging with this angle, some are happier to accuse Cameron of propaganda and leave that void wide open for the EDL.

Cameron made a pigs ear out of his recent speech, but many on the left have hardly been accurate in their critiques.

Yesterday has proved to be the day when Conservative Party managers, including Steve Hilton, turned their back on the Red Tory Phillip Blond for what they call his “progressive nonsense” (something Guido the un-chido is delighted about [h/t Richard].

On twitter this has kickstarted the conversation on where to place Blond on the political map – a task most people will agree is very difficult (unless of course you are Paul Sagar).

On 1 July this year I had the good fortune to interview Mr Blond, with my then colleague Katy, for an in-house magazine I was working on. The subject matter was how to revise the social care system now that the public sector was undergoing a fiscal tightening, and in particular whether Blond felt there was a case for public spending as a means of investing for the future. We did get sidetracked a number of times, but mainly we stayed on task.

I mentioned a spending strategy to him known as spending to save, something popularised recently in a New Economics Foundation report entitled Backing the Future – where it is mentioned that more spending and investment in children and young people could potentially save the UK £486 billion in the future. Blond replied that “As a rule public expenditure is very hard to, as it were, use revenue expenditure in the way that has a capital effect, if you see what I mean, because this is in fact capital expenditure, but in a social framework”.

Blond continued: “We haven’t yet really, in terms of the state, found a way to capitalise, if you like, or put into the capital expenditure stream, money that come, that we have to fund in an income way, so there’s always a hill or a mountain that requires financing, and that’s what in essence tends to prevent these things happening.” In keeping with Blond’s vision, to recapitalise the poor so they can enjoy asset-wealth and a long term savings culture, it is his contention that the state and it’s expenditure has little chance of having an effect on capital creation, but worse than that, in essence money that comes into being through income seldom finds itself in the capital expenditure stream. It sounds as though this is inherent to public expenditure, and since that is in conflict with Blond’s overall project, it may be the case that the future of capitalism for him leaves the state in the shadows.

One of the things that gains Blond the label “progressive” is his insistence on spreading out, and decentralising capital, in order that whole communities don’t suffer generations of poverty. Really, Blond despises the fact that wealth stays at the top, and makes no bones about saying as much. On the subject he told me that “[i]f you look at manufacturing there is no lending to manufacturing in this country, inordinate percentages of our lending goes into private residential housing stock, rather than into creating the business infrastructure for private sector growth. So the key thing would be to stop the centralisation of capital, and the state insurance function, the state has helped to centralise capital by insuring investment banking activity, and by insuring investment banking activity, what they do is lose the risk for investment, but of course capital goes to where there is the highest return, the greatest degree of security, if the government insures your activity, your speculative activity, then you’re in a win-win situation, which is what they are doing.”

The problem of the state here, for Blond, is twofold; 1) the state helps the centralisation of capital; 2) it secures dodgy speculative activity. His solution: remove the state insurance function – it is no good for private sector growth and centralises capital, thus puts up barriers to the recapitalisation of the poor.

I asked Blond whether he felt the economy could afford a spending model based on the spend now save later? Blond firmly replied: “I mean no one in the world, anyone serious, thinks you can have an economy run by the public sector. Who thinks that? Not even Karl Marx thought that. And the reason you can’t, is that the public sector itself is not a generator of wealth. It’s a maintainer of wealth, but it is a good that needs other good to come with it, and the goods to come with it, all predicated on the back of private sector growth. Unless you can have private sector growth, you can’t generate the taxes, the tax base, you won’t reduce unemployment, you can’t do anything. But you can’t finance yourself into a deeper hole and think that will deliver.”

At this stage you get the feeling that Blond doesn’t simply think the state is currently doing a bad job at harnessing private sector growth, but that the state in itself frustrates the very mechanisms the private sector was created to operate. In response to a question on whether we will ever be able to promote a spend to save model, post-recession, Blond reminds us that he is “just very doubtful of the role of the state in this country. I just don’t think it is an effective vehicle for anything really, or for anything very much. Often the state is left picking up the pieces of the destruction of civil society. The key decisive move is to have civil society to answer these problems, because civil society is a self-correcting entity, as soon as you associate you’re much healthier and much better things happen; the key task is to allow civil society take over from the state. Where a period in society where civil society and the state works, but that’s a different thing. So if you are in Denmark or Scandinavia where the state is an expression of a strong civil society, they can work much better together in a symbiosis. But we’re not in that position in this country, where in a position where the state and the market have both annihilated society, so we actually, as a precondition of an effective state, and an effective market, we need to rebuild association.”

He is obviously very romantic with regards to the state, but one is left wondering whether this symbiosis between state and market, which he speaks of here, is well considered at all. If Blond cannot see the role of the state in this country as an effective vehicle for anything, as well as slavishly clearing up the mess of the destruction of civil society, what worth for him is there in keeping state functions at all?

The state, for Blond, will only work, as he reminds me, “ on the basis on the sort of society I’m arguing for” – which is where it plays as little part in society as is possible.

Blond ends by saying “[t]he great agent of the creation of the poor is the state, and the market has been captured by oligarchs, or oligopolies and monopolies, which then follows rent-seeking behaviour, that essentially destroys the life chances of everyone else.” Blond uses unfamiliar rhetoric to many used to simple left/right divides, but essentially we can see where he is coming from; the state has been implicated in the concentration of wealth, just as much as markets have, which also favour vast riches within small elites.

The type of society Blond wants to see is one where capital is dispersed further – but in order to do this the state is a hindrance, not an example. It is no secret that Blond holds a social conservatism, in part related to his Christian world-view, in part as reaction to what he calls the social relativism of liberalism. Additionally, the state holds a romantic, symbolic place in society, but often frustrates the good society. For this reason there is an element to which he can be labelled a civic republican of sorts, but for me this doesn’t quite cut the mustard; I fear his dislike of the state’s functions goes a little further. Therefore in Blond I see a notable essence of paleolibertarianism – an amount which cannot be ignored.

There has been a lot of recent interest by politicians and think tanks lately to support the empowerment of frontline workers, and nowhere is this more relevant than for social work.

Good social work can mean the world of difference for many in society, though the profession has suffered consistent set backs, hindered by inadequate recruitment, retention, resources, training, leadership and public understanding.

The debate on increasing professional standards, and making selection tougher, has come at the same time as the argument suggesting more families need close contact with social workers. The problem becomes quite clear; while caseloads should increase, and social work be more autonomous, it must become tougher to be a social worker, with extended training and rigorous selection.

Many academic reports on the subject call for government to increase incentives for social workers, such as introducing sabbaticals to ease the stress of full time social work. But already this necessitates a huge increase in the total workforce.

Projects like Progressive Conservatism at Demos have been enthusiastic about self-directed social work services, particularly in their report Leading from the Front. The idea is they combine operations and management functions rather than separate them, ridding stifling middle management and building a more autonomous profession.

Six pilots for GP-styled social work practices are currently underway in Blackburn with Darwen, Hillingdon, Kent, Liverpool, Staffordshire and Sandwell, which have already gained support from the Conservatives – even before the pilot results have been fed back – but they have not found favour with everyone across the sector.

Back in 2008 Sutton Council team manager Maureen Floyd noted that “social workers already criticise lack of direct work with children.” Rather than being an exercise in reducing bureaucracy, the finance management of social work practices could increase the time social workers spend in front of computer screens and further frustrate their desire to work directly with children.

Whether the benefits of a social work practice outweighed the problems was a problem even Julian Le Grand – who came up with the idea of social work practices before they were introduced in the Care Matters White Paper in 2007 – couldn’t solve. For him they could either save money having no hierarchies, or they could turn out to be more expensive because of an increase in staff pay.

It is no secret that Independent Fostering Agencies (IFAs) produce generous returns for their work – which could act as a incentive for the social workforce. Ian Crosby, an independent social worker and foster carer, has suggested that for every 22 children in placement they get a £1m turnover. But huge profits should not be the prime motivator for social work. Instead, these surgeries could be linked to social enterprise bonds, where the government only pays out if savings have been made, transferring risk onto the service providers, and in turn investors, themselves.

The need for more autonomy in social work does not necessarily lend itself to privatisation. If self-directed social work is feasible at all, then it is just as likely in the public sector as it is in the private sector. After all the complaints from social workers go deeper than financial rewards. Higher standards of social work need appropriate remuneration, but rewards need to reflect what the workforce is really calling for, including fewer hours and better investment for training.

Social work practices are certainly a relevant topic for this debate, but for a revolution to take place in social work, we do not have to reinvent the wheel, government just has to listen up.

He won’t tell me any details, but apparently Paul – yes, you know him, the one who writes on this blog – spoke to none other than Phillip Blond at the Labour Party conference, supposedly – and among other things – about me and my utilisation of the term “epistemic closure” to designate a good portion of the electorate who support the Conservative Party, despite being theoretically very removed from actual conservatism.

Paul has written some blog posts opposing my use of this term, so I can only imagine it was a critical conversation, but at least I got those two fogey’s talking.

Not one to blow my own, it turns out I’m not alone in thinking there is some parity in the Conservative Party and those for whom the charge “epistemically closed” had originally been levelled at by Julian Sanchez – those dreaded Tea Party folk in the US.

Four days ago, Patrick J. Buchanan of The American Conservative magazine – yes my favourite too – labelled Cameron the ‘Tea Party Tory’. (h/t Freddy Gray of the Speccie).

In fact, he goes further than I do. In my writings, I said Cameron is probably a limp-wristed leftie Tory who is able to sleep at night under the pretence he cares for the poor, but in order to be electable in his party, needs to appeal to a certain section of the party, what I call the epistemically closed section.

Buchanan, in fact, says that Cameron’s party’s cuts reflect exactly the ethos of the tea party – small government at a drastic scale.

No doubt as the money talks, Cameron’s soft social Toryism will be piss in the wind compared to the damage wielded by his cust agenda. Perhaps I didn’t go far enough in calling Cameron out for the epistemic closure inside his party.

Background articles:

The epistemic closure of the Conservative Party

Cameron will fail in reviving Conservatism

David Cameron and the Conservative identity crisis

Unfortunately, today’s growth figures act as a Rorschach test; the coalition government and its supporters see growth at 0.8% in the third quarter of 2010, and growth for the last six months at 2%. What the opposition will see is a drop of 0.4% when between April and June growth was positioned at 1.2%.

Since growth was forecasted far lower than expected, many – such as Vince Cable, who was said to have a big smile on his face this morning, possibly after finding out the data – are probably just pleased to see a higher figure, not because it is necessarily a good sign for the economy, but simply because it will make for easy smoke and mirrors. Look we can cut and grow, it’s easy.

Others may note that the worst of the cuts have not been factored into the figures yet. It’s important to note that cuts will have been factored in already; the squeeze for many councils started a while ago, redundancies are a reality now, and small and medium businesses (SMEs) are already checking their books with a grimace.

Construction was the real winner with contributions of 4% (p. 3), compared with an increase of 9.5% in the previous quarter, and 11% since Q3 2009 and Q3 2010.

Read in a certain way, today’s figures will prove politically opportune for the Tory/Lib Dem government, which may set back Labour’s current lead in the polls. But it is not mere politicking to point out that the severity of the cuts, spelt out in the CSR last week, have not been entirely factored in, and that growth really needs to be sustained and sustainable.

There is even tension within the government about the road to growth. Vince Cable has recently slammed David Cameron’s optimism, saying that the “sunlit uplands” strategy will not necessarily be the case. If he has any sense about him, Cable’s supposed smile this morning will be matched by caution.

In Cameron’s “new economic dynaims” vision, he wants to “make sure we have a banking sector that is really focused on small business lending … rather than the banks thinking how [they] can become bigger and bigger investment banks.”

Cameron hopes to get those banks which the government has a stakeholder share of, to start lending again and fuelling a private sector revolution.

According to a recent NEF report entitled Where did our money go? the 2009 budget noted that RBS needed to lend an additional £25bn (£9bn – mortgage / £16bn – business); Lloyds an additional £14bn (£3bn – mortgage / £11bn – business); Northern Rock an additional £5bn in 2009 / £3-9bn from 2010 onwards.

After the bailout, there was disappointment that the banks were increasing the bonus pot without actually kickstarting small businesses with money. In an ongoing discussion I had with an acquaintance, I was reminded that the bailout was paid in order to cover liabilities at the time, but the reason behind doing so, and not allowing them to fail, was so they could start lending again – for this is the reason why those banks are too big to fail.

What to make of Ken Clarke’s plans for prisons? His speech later today will apparently denounce the great and growing size of prison populations, call for a focus on cutting re-offending and will imply that it’s Labour’s outdated approach which is at fault; “[J]ust banging up more and more people for longer without actively seeking to change them is what you would expect of Victorian England.”

In actual fact, the Tories have long had what one might call a ‘progressive’ (ugh, hate that word) streak on crime and punishment. In the late 1980s, prison populations under the Tories began to fall as Douglas Hurd and others tried to establish consensus around non-custodial ideas, which would see people avoid prison. But to leave the matter there is to ignore staggering contradictions on the part of the Tories.

Firstly, there’s no proposal to get rid of what has essentially become a people-herding industry of private companies, to whom a lot of services have been outsourced. Clarke’s proposition of pay by performance on the basis of re-offending avoided will not fly – as in other outsourced industries, without cast-iron government guarantees of profit, private companies will avoid sectors that don’t look profitable.

Tory rhetoric here doesn’t escape the New Labourite paradigms.

Secondly, for all this talk about prisons being places of education – a solid and welcome return of a very old liberal idea – this won’t help a great deal if there aren’t any jobs to go to when people get out of prison. With millions unemployed, and Tory plans to slash the State sector to ribbons proceeding apace – and private sector investment not yet prepared to pick up the slack – education won’t stop a slide to crime.

Thirdly, if the answer to the second problem is the social welfare net, then this adds a further contradiction to ‘progressive’ Conservative plans for rehabilitating offenders. Said social welfare net is to face cuts. This, I suspect was one of the key problems with Douglas Hurd’s attempt to reduce prison populations; on his watch, he wanted fewer people in prison – but as inequality rose and communities fragmented under the Tories, crime rose.

Thus the voices on the Tory Right sounded a great deal more authoritative.

Fourthly, Clarke’s proposal is aimed in part at cutting costs – he has said so himself. Apparently the new soundbyte is that sending a man to prison (£38,000) is now more expensive than sending a boy to Eton. Several academics – such as Prof. Malcom Davies – have come forward to suggest that actually leaving potential re-offenders at large (and even with continuing educational measures, reoffending jumped by 8% from 2006-8) costs more than prison.

Since a large number of these people will surely be released to unemployment, this type of false economy can be compared to the Tory false economy of slashing Labour’s job creation schemes and calling it a saving. The upshot is a lot more people claiming various types of benefits, whereas the strategic use of Labour’s funds would have allowed private industry to reduce the cost of employing someone whilst still footing some of the bill.

If the Tories are allowed their own way on the economy, coalition or no coalition, the deeply reactionary hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade on the right of the Tory Party will not be long in re-establishing themselves – something that happened to Ken Clarke when he was last Home Secretary. As privatisation and the attempt to extract ever more labour for less pay from prison staff continues unabated, I worry to think how our prisons will end up.

This is, after all, the same Conservative Party which resoundingly endorsed Labour’s massive expansion plans – worth some £4bn – of the prison system.

I’m glad to see the Conservative government is opposed to a minimum price law on alcohol. As I said last time this issue came up, I am opposed to such a law on the grounds that people should be allowed to drink to excess if they wish. I rejected the argument that the social costs of the related ill-health and crime justifies government intervention.

The issue has recently flared up because Tesco came out to support a minimum pricing system, and because NICE has subsequently also come out for a minimum price per unit of alcohol. What few enough people noticed when Tesco came out for the law is that this view is self-interested; it will mean they no longer have to worry about cutting prices.

Currently many supermarkets sell alcohol for less than it is worth to them – it brings customers into the store and, so the theory goes, customers will buy other goods which are sold for a profit. A minimum price on alcohol eliminates this practice, as the minimum would almost certainly be well above the cut prices of supermarkets.

To give an example of how this work, Professor Anne Ludbrook, one of the authors of the NICE report, said the following:

“At the example price of 50 pence, a bottle of vodka would be just over £13. Whereas in the supermarkets currently you could find vodka selling at below £8. Cheap white cider, for example, would go up to over £7 a bottle. It’s currently selling at about £2.” [BBC]

In the case of the cider and vodka, that’s £5 per bottle which covers the amount supermarkets used to write off as a loss, to get customers into the store, and probably adds a healthy profit to the sale as well. The minimum pricing would also eliminate the need for supermarkets to compete; they could just sell everything for the minimum price.

Self-interest beats outright misinformation, however, which is where the drinks industry have put their faith.

Simon Litherland of Diageo GB said: “Yet again it is disappointing to see continued support for minimum pricing despite no credible empirical evidence that it would be an effective measure in reducing alcohol-related harm.”

Andrew Opie, food policy director at the British Retail Consortium, said: “It’s too simplistic to say the UK’s alcohol problems are down to price.

“Irresponsible alcohol consumption is primarily a cultural issue that needs to be addressed through education and information.”

There is evidence, from studies prepared for the Scottish Parliament, as it debated minimum pricing laws that a) price increases do correlate to decreased demand, b) that binge dringers, young drinkers and harmful drinkers all choose cheaper drinks and will be hit by minimum pricing laws and c) that increased taxation and prices do reduce harm.

All of which escapes the point I raised the last time, that the people who are likely to be affected by drinks with an enforced minimum price will be poor people. People who can’t afford to pay £13 instead of £8 for a bottle of vodka. Or, the examples which I raised last time, minimum £6 for a bottle of pinot or a couple of six packs of lager.

My query is, why should they have to? We don’t routinely tax or look down upon any number of practices which cost the NHS and other social services money. Why should alcohol be different?

If it is the social effects of binge drinking we want to combat, then challenging the culture that our cities inspire with ever decreasing number of social places except pubs would be a start. So would challenging the culture of silence around things like domestic violence, or educating people in safe practices to protect against rape.

Meanwhile, NICE can get off their high horse, from which they claim that alcohol consumption problems, including 15,000 direct deaths, cost the NHS £2 bn per year. Which is awesome, because the taxes levied on alcohol bring in well over £5 bn per year. If the government wants more revenue, to devote to social purposes like making our cities sociable once more, they can get it from the breweries, and end the monopolistic practices which drive our pubs to seek high-turnover rather than a social clientele.