Happy New Non-Story

Happy New Year to everyone.  I thought I'd start of the year with a nice non-news-story brought to us by our friends in the Scottish National Party.  A chap called Stewart Maxwell of the SNP quite rightly wants to stop sales of alcohol to those who are under-age and so he has written to supermarkets asking them to stop selling booze through self-service tills... well he says that's the reason he's doing it, although personally I think it's just a cheap way to get some personal media attention. 

His big point is that, "[i]t would make much more sense for alcohol as a licensed product to only be for sale through a full service till where a sales assistant can properly assess a customer's age."  Whenever I've tried to buy alcohol (or any age-restricted item) through a self-service till the machine makes an infuriating beeping noise and will not allow you to continue with the transcation until a member of staff has confirmed my age.  The self-service tills won't even let me get away with buying two boxes of ibuprofen at a time let alone anything more serious.

I agree that politicians should take an interest in whether kids are drinking themselves silly, but this story just reminds me of Jim Hacker's route to become Prime Minister when he and Sir Humphrey took a non-story about the "euro-sausage", put a bad spin on it then solved the "problem" with some tough action.

Incidentally, anybody who thinks that I've just done exactly the same thing by writing about this non-sense is quite right.

Comments

  1. Hideki4 January 2011 at 11:26

    High fat emulsified offal tube anyone?

    ReplyDelete
  2. phisheep7 January 2011 at 12:03

    "[i]t would make much more sense for alcohol as a licensed product to only be for sale through a full service till where a sales assistant can properly assess a customer's age."

    So, on that basis, he'd shut down the whole of the online whisky industry that forms so much of Scotland's exports, eh?

    I don't think he thunk this through much.

    Happy New Year DB - good to see you back.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are items referred to in s.9’s as exhibits bound to be served?

  Background - CPS served a witness statement on me that exhibited two BWV clips that are potentially relevant to the Crown’s case and may have some relevance to the defence case insofar as they are likely to show the lighting and weather at the time events happened. Somebody has listed the clips as unused material rather than putting them in the exhibits folder that accompanies the served evidence. This raised an interesting (to me anyway) question about whether a party who exhibits an item in a statement is bound to serve it on their opponent. At court the judge took the view that the Crown were at liberty to classify items exhibited in s9s as unused material if they chose not to rely upon them in evidence. I took the view that if they are exhibited then they must be served along with the witness statement that exhibits the item and that the solution to a situation where the Crown say they are now unused is to edit the witness statement to remove the reference, by agreement with the
More gibberish >>

Is there twice as much violent crime in the UK versus the USA?

Image
The tweet from Charlie Kirk I came across a screenshot of a Twitter post while on Facebook this morning. The original post now has 11,000 retweets and 23,000 likes on Twitter. As you can see from the picture somebody called Charlie Kirk, who is a right-wing American commentator, claims that there are 933 violent crimes in the UK per 100,000 people. This is more than double the rate he claims for the USA where he says there are only 399 violent crimes per 100,000 people. The UK doesn’t feel that violent to me, so is it true? We’re all gonna die According to the FBI, in 2016 there were 1,248,185 violent crimes committed across the whole of the USA. That is an increase of 4.1% on the 2015 figure but still represented only 386.3 violent crimes per 100,000 people . So, Mr Kirk appears to be slightly overestimating the violent crime in the USA. I should say that I am using the 2016 figures as those are the latest available on the FBI website, so maybe he has slightly differe
More gibberish >>

Driving without insurance

Image
Insurance is a contract that remains in force until it expires or is cancelled As you may, or may not, know I specialise in motoring law and most of my work involves defending people accused of drink driving . With the drink driving often come other road traffic offences such as driving while disqualified and driving without insurance. It’s driving without insurance I want to talk about today because I think far too many police officers, solicitors, barristers and judges miss a key legal point when looking at these cases. I’ve received prosecution papers today for somebody accused of driving while disqualified and driving without insurance. The no insurance element is claim that the suspect did not tell the insurer about the disqualification. In his statement, the police officers says, “ [I] contacted [the insurer] who called me back informing me they would not consider the insurance policy valid as there were no convictions disclosed.” Looks like an open an
More gibberish >>