A minimum pricing strategy won't stop someone becoming or persisting in being an alcoholic. Addicts are addicts, they'll find ways to satisfy their addiction no matter what barriers you put in their way.

Neither will it stop the middle class or celebrity set that you see stumbling out of nightclubs or high end bars off their faces.

It's targeted squarely at those on low incomes (benefits/tax credit claimants?) to prevent them from spending any of the money the state gives them on alcohol. It's another piece of ideology dressed up as being "for our own good".

I was thinking pretty much exactly the same thing. The different licensing hours are a big factor IMO. I went to Uni in 1977 to Aberystwyth and there were 52 pubs, one for every week of the year in a town with a population of 12,000 plus 4000 students. Back then the whole town was dry on Sunday's so never mind closing at 10may[/i alter this behaviour but many of the pubs do deals on shots for a quid a go (or less) so its not just supermarket bought booze that is the issue.

Like you we were no angles and one pub, The Castle, brewed its own extremely dodgy very cloudy cider that was rocket fuel but there was no culture that meant we always drank loads of that. It was something to do to say you had done it and survived, not a regular tipple. As with yourself we drank beer and given the limited time it was on sale this limited your consumption.

So I don't know how we got to where we have because there seem two problems. The drinking culture that is shot-based with the aim of getting blatted asap and the effect the relaxed licensing laws seem to have had.

I have been in Aber staying overnight since my son went there and I am sure we were not out at 2am mid-week which saw plenty of evidence of. My son tells me people doing that are usually out on a "social" from a sports club or society. Different clubs and societies have them on different days of the week (obviously) so there is a constant late night scene going on. The fact they are still going at 2am is clearly a direct result of longer opening hours and in this town the pubs tapping the student market.

I know our EU friends have nearly always had long opening hours and don't seem to have the problem but IMO I think you are spot on to suggest the opening hours in the UK are part of the problem.

What is by far the biggest difference between the UK and our EU cousins is that culturally, groups of young people simply have to go out and get absolutely, positively wasted into near-oblivion, or else it isn't a night out.

It was by no means always so, and there's no reason it always needs to be so, but that's it at the moment, peer pressure, plain and simple, "if we're on a night out then we have to get shiitfaced".

Beacuse what supermarkets need is a boost to their profits...

It is flawed in Scotland and it is flawed down south.

Mind I did like Millibands line at PMQ's

May I join the procession of the, erm , elder community?

We drank beer too.
It wasn't as strong as, say, Stella is now and you usually got full before you got utterly blasted.
Sometimes (not always) we would be worse for wear by the end of the evening but never at the start of the evening because the whole point was to go out and enjoy the drinking.
Getting blasted as a preparation for a night out was never even considered.

Missed it, what was it?

"With the Uturn on minimum pricing on alcohol, just what can the PM do in a brewery?"

Even if that is the actual case, which is another debate, there are many, many doctors who see large numbers of the people you describe destroying their lives and those of their family by killing themselves on ultra cheap alcohol that they would have little or no access to if it was priced higher.
As someone said this morning, give it a try, if it doesn't work then drop the policy. There are pockets of the population who are simply being destroyed by cheap booze and perhaps pricing it beyond their reach in the first place might work. I haven't seen anyone even hint that this is a way of stiffing the poor again.
I'd also argue that with the financial stresses on the middle classes (one for the groups shown to be increasing in alcohol consumption), increasing the price will have an effect. Coming home from work can I really afford 10 quid a night on a bottle of wine? Maybe I can stretch to a fiver but at a certain price point you start to think, not tonight.
Again as someone said this morning, why can't supermarkets discount vegetables or household essentials instead of alcohol?

The minimum price for a bottle of wine at 12%abv would be under a fiver.

They're usually really lame in PMQs but that's not a bad one at all.

Couldn't organise a brew-up in a patisserie.

Another important factor but one which seems to pass the government by is that, just as in the case of fags, the higher the price of booze, the greater the profits for criminals to bootleg it. It is well known that the trade in counterfeit baccy and booze is worth many billions, and the more you put up the price, the more people will be driven into buying potentially very dodgy stuff, much of which the avergae punter wouldn't even readily know was dodgy - there are loads of off-licences etc who sell fake bottles of vodka and whisky and not all of them even know it, although I suspect many either do, or turn a blind eye to the provenance.

Maybe they could sell all spirits in plain bottles, like fags in brown paper. That would cut down on fake booze, wouldn't it?

We already have laws banning the serving to people who have already had too much and the offence of being drunk and disorderly ... do we need to enforce this better and make the penalties greater?

Neither have any effect of someone drinking a skin full of Ace "cider" at home every night.

Yes.
I took the educated decision to stop my 10 year homely stint of supping vast amounts of 2 litre bottles of White Lightning.
I believe my liver is in remission.

No, but could enforcement and penalties have an effect on public drukenness?