Are you on your way to the Forum?

Don’t forget, if you’re a party member you can register for the Lib Dem Voice members’ forum – in which case you get to read and post on a rich variety of topics which don’t always make it into the public blog. Here’s a selection of the currently active threads to whet your appetites:

* PPCs for the next General Election
* [ Poll ] Cannabis or Skunk?
* Great article on Vince in today’s Guardian
* Artwork for leaflets
* Do you web 2.0?
* Berwick on Tweed
* Blogging help required

(Disclaimer: though LDV’s forum moderators do our best to ensure membership is restricted to party members only, no forum is 100% safe. So, if you are posting something a little, erm, controversial, do count to 10, and think about it first…)

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8 Comments

  • Binge drinking in town centres has been going on for quite some time. Certainly all my adult life (and a chunk of my childhood too).

    It indubitably got worse during the 70s and 80s, and accelerated after 1987 with a levelling off in the late 1990s.

    The reasons are twofold:

    (1) The steady increase in the disposable income of young people.

    (2) The Town & Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 1987, which enabled the hospitality trade to open up cafes in town centres and convert them into pubs without needing to obtain planning permission for change of use.

    No (2) was a deliberate response by the Thatcher government to lobbying from the brewing industry which was seeking to swamp town centres with “super pubs” in order to maximise profits during a period of contraction for their sector.

    The moral right cannot honestly moan about teenage drinking (as if this is something terribly wicked and presages the collapse of civilisation) when the Prime Minister it worships caused the problem.

    Now, I am old enough to remember a moral panic about binge drinking in the Summer of 1988. Strange, 20 years later the world still exists.

  • I have posted the above in the WRONG thread. Sorry.

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