It is always sad when one so young goes off the rails, but it important to keep that in perspective as i said earlier. Any response should be proportionate to the problem, which IMHO we see as a direct result of government being the problem, not the solution. This is something that good parenting should resolve, not government or police.

However, it is likely that government or its advisor’s will over-react, give a knee jerk response to be seen to be doing something rather than nothing and come up with a new ban along the lines of the smoking ban.

We face the banning of everyday things on a daily basis, and one very good site in particular has been logging these for several years, which I certainly recommend one reads if only to get a larger picture of how these minds, those we have mockingly called Bansterbators, actually work.

It is called Nanny Knows Best, and is written by Ken Frost.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1036578/EU-bans-Peking-Duck-forcing-council-snoopers-shut-restaurant-ovens-Chinatown.html

pat

Your comments on the Brooms, yes, fully appreciate how stupid this is, futile almost, but like so many of these stupid things in modern Europe it has nothing to do with Health and Safety.

It is about creating more and more draconian rules that individuals and businesses must follow in order to create a new market for said goods that the regulations say we must apply in order to be compliant.
Regulation = new markets.

This in part is how we a) Destroy existing national cultures in order to create the perfect Europe out of the chaos, b) give the impression of continual fiscal growth whilst those at the bottom of the heap just end up paying for this rubbish either with more taxes by regulation or unwanted / unnecessary equipment from said regulation.

As for the drinking. The law states that under certain circumstances (local authority licensing) certain establishments may remain open 24 hours after applying for said licence and upon payment of a huge fee.

In reality, there are NO 24hour bars in the UK. The vast majority of pubs and clubs are unchanged and still close at 11pm. At a push you may find some who stay open till midnight or 1am having applied and paid for the extension to ‘standard hours’. I have never found one that remains open until 4am.

The responsibility for excessive drinking lays not with the establishments that sell alcohol, but always with those who buy it and abuse it.
We must remember that this problem, although over-inflated in the press only accounts for approximately 0.4% of people who are of drinking age (18-deathbed), therefore 99.96% of that same drinking population are both responsible in their drinking habits and not anti social in doing so.

So to Karagush I say, Yes, your puritanical behaviour is very silly, very silly indeed. Lets keep this in perspective.

We don’t need anyone else telling us how to live our lives because you think you know better than the majority of us law abiding citizens because of the actions of a few stupid ones.

Now, where were the parents whilst this child/young adult was drinking herself to death. Where was that parental responsibility, that concern of loving parents who must have seen their under-age child on the slippery slope.

You see, its so easy to blame everyone else rather than accept any responsibility and in today’s political climate that is something which is actively encouraged, but then its even easier for the professional politico’s to hype in the press for cheap political point scoring..