Gary Monro’s blog

The government is being panicked by its own relaxations of alcohol consumption laws. I ridiculed wrote about the idea recently that television ads were planned to combat excessive drinking. Now we may be getting warning labels on beer bottles:

Alcohol manufacturers have agreed to use the warnings after talks with the Department of Health. The alcohol industry hopes the move will pre-empt any legislation to force it to introduce stark health warnings similar to those now seen on cigarette packets.

Yes, I see it now. Hordes of drunken chavs experiencing their very own Damascene moments as brightly coloured warning labels catch their attentions. Throwing down their bottles (in the litter bins provided for the purpose, of course) they make declarations of sobriety and go home to play dominoes. Tony Blair takes a bow and wins the next three elections.

Watching the news this weekend confirms - if it needed confirming - that the Sunnis, Kurds and Shi’ites are simply three, unrelated tribes thrown together by Britain’s border creation activities after World War 1 who have no desire to live with each other if they can possibly avoid it.

With the world’s recent history showing that some states kept together by fear - the USSR and Yugoslavia, for example - will try to go their seperate ways when given even a glimmer of a chance one cannot be overly surprised should the various tribes of the Iraqi state seek to take advantage of the present situation and make a break for independence.

The draft constitution was mainly a Kurdish/Shi’ite creation, handed to the Sunnis on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The Sunnis may very well leave it - with serious consequences for the region’s coalition rulers.

An Iraq partitioned along its ethnic and cultural groupings might create a far simpler scenario for the US to administer. And a simpler, more stable region requires fewer troops - an ideal domestic sweetener for President Bush.

Ken Clarke has tried to put the European Union issue out of the frame by announcing that the single currency would not be appropriate for the UK for at least 10 years.

He hasn’t become anti-European. He’s become pro-Being Leader of the Conservative Party.

EU-Serf suggests a test for Mr Clarke to pass if we’re ever to believe we can trust him not to sell our soul to the EU:

If Ken Clarke has really renounced the EU and all its evil ways, will he resign from the Euro Movement and the Tory Europe Network?

The European Movement - wants to create increased unity among European nations and peoples. It’s ‘About Us’ section is short but manages to name-drop Winston Churchill twice.

The Tory Europe Network - quotes Mr Clarke thus: “a very large number of Conservatives believe in the pro-European tradition that has made our party so great for so long.”

They must have wrung this one from him at the end of a particularly intensive pub-crawl because not even he can possibly believe this…

And David Cameron’s attempted wooing of pro-European ex-Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine doesn’t exactly endear him to conservatives either. Unfortunately for him, the pro-European Heseltine is plumping for the equally pro-European Clarke.

Police feared this:

Muggings rose by 23 per cent in London last month as thousands of police were sent to guard the capital’s transport network after terrorist attacks.

Areas of London that provided most bobbies experienced the steepest rises. Waltham Forest, northeast London, saw robberies nearly double.

Make hay while the sun shines, eh?