Vernon Coaker, who, despite having a name that makes him sound like a malevolent but ineffectual villain from an early Dickens novel, is a Home Office minister. According to the BBC he wants to:

change the view it [is] "acceptable to drink to get drunk".

The mechanism young Vern's going to use to do this is the National Alcohol Strategy, which is based on the naive thesis that we'll all be persuaded to drink less if the government moans at us about it long enough and loud enough.

I'm actually rather sympathetic to some of the aims of the strategy. People should be free to drink themselves silly, but I don't want to help foot the £20bn annual bill for fixing their livers and the people they beat up while they're pissed. This is one area where I'd actually say that an increase in tax is a good idea. Alcohol is, relatively, cheaper than it's been for a century. If we increase the duty on booze we can at least make drinkers pay, indirectly, for their own problems. It's what we do with smokers.

But that's far too simple a solution for Her Majesty's ministers. Instead of doing something minimal and sensible they decide they're going to '...change the English drinking culture'. This is offensive in itself: ministers should focus on educating kids, keeping the streets clean, defending us and arranging hip replacements for grannies. Trying to change our culture means manipulating the way we think.

To call it this kind of attitude 'nannyish' isn't just a cliché - it glosses over a political sensibility that's truly anti-democratic. Most people (the demos that goes with kratein to make demokratia, so kind of intrinsic to the whole deal) want neither to be bossed around by the government nor to pay for thousands of new livers every year.

So there you go, Vern: a solution to the problem. Up the booze duty, then shut up. Then if people want to get pissed, let them get pissed. They'll be covering the expenses.