. There must be lots of other people like me who are sick to death with not only being expected to toady to dopey woolly liberal prejudices about the evils of drink but with being asked to bankroll their propagators as well. This was rammed home to me when I was asked if Budvar would like to subscribe to a new project, a partnership between government and drinks business, to do something or other involving vastly expensive advertising and pr activity to influence the drinking habits of the young.
Besides the fact that the words “project” and “partnership” in any proposal make my flesh creep I realised what was being presented to me was all part of the insidious neo-temperance movement that is getting its hands on the levers of our business almost unnoticed. Anti-democratic, anti-social and essentially anti-human it wants our whole industry dead. This is despite that fact that everybody seems to have forgotten how much we contribute to the economy. This is because our opponents, invariably people who for the most part haven’t got a clue about running a business, like to play this down. My hero, the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, described them recently as being enemies of both market and democracy, because they always thrived best in communist societies, where as members of the nomenklatura (chattering class) they got paid for simply talking. We have certainly forgotten what happened the last time these particular lunatics took over the asylum, in the mother of market economies, the US. There are still the descendants of gangsters living in style on the proceeds their ancestors made then, and good luck to them.
Of course the British nomenklatura is one sector that is doing well out of the new business of harrying our industry. I received an invite recently to a seminar entitled “Alcohol- the Next Step” for which I was expected to pay to attend to discuss “minimum pricing and constraints on alcohol availability”. Talk about turkeys being asked to vote for Christmas. What is really annoying is that all this is a diversion from the truly crucial mission our business is engaged in at the moment with government in sorting out the future shape of our industry. Whatever else we don’t do we must keep our eye on this particular ball and make sure the neo-prohibitionists don’t get a look in.
(ends)
