Delay in blogging for while, due to a busy week and Joe being sick. The small highlight in his week of sky high temperatures was a visit to the chemist to pick up his prescription. It's always nice to save £1.85 when you don't expect it, and in that particular minute, I felt like dancing round the chemists. Very tragic, I know.The real kicker was when I was leaving - a guy had just been in Haddows across the road, and was complaining bitterly to his pal about how Gordon Brown had just cost him extra on a bottle of vodka.
What the SNP giveth, London Labour taketh away... no wonder support for independence is on the rise!
2 comments:
My take on the scenario you describe is that if the guy went a whole lot less to Haddows for his vodka he would have a whole less need to eventually depend on affordable NHS prescriptions. Alcohol remains tyhe great awful scar across Scottish society. The quicker that Gordon Brown or anyone else piles on the cost of alcohol the better. Politicans should have the courage not to decry that (I'm sure you own comment is purely light-hearted).
I think we need a collective national consensus to get to where our Scandanavian cousins reached almost a century ago. They realised that they just 'could not handle' the alcohol thing and went for highly taxing it and restricting the outlets. The consequence is that they have moved out of what was a long enduring historical era of some of the most widespread and deeply ingrained alcohol problems in the world.
Finland was the exception and the Finnish remain the only Scandanavians to compete with Scotland for the prize of sadest alcohol victims in the develped world.
What you say is true - although I did put it in as a throwaway anecdote, it is a very real issue. However, I'm sure I've said before, the problem is more than just cost. It's attitude.
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