Drink 'n' Drugs
To the surprise of no one, the new Mayor of London has already succeeded in annoying me. It's the first annoyance, so worth recording. :-) And it is this, from 1 June, Boris Johnson will ban the drinking of alcohol on public transport.
On the face of it, this sounds like a good idea. Drunk people are a nuisance and especially so in the enclosed spaces of public transport. However, this is again an example of a politician introducing a new policy where the old rules were perfectly adequate, if only someone would bloody well enforce them.
I would be delighted if there was a concerted move to chucking obnoxious drunks off the Tube, but this penalises well-behaved alcohol drinkers too. Maybe I lived in the Netherlands for too long, but I don't automatically start twitching when I see someone on the train with a beer in their hand.
Also, the Mayor was apparently in such haste to bring in the ban, that he neglected to consult with the transport staff who would have to enforce it. To be fair, I don't expect the transport unions to have that much love for Boris but this was asking for trouble.
On the "other side", the Labour home secretary has ignored her own experts' advice and will reclassify cannabis back from class C to class B, which includes drugs like speed. The sentencing guidelines for dealing class C and B drugs are pretty similar, by the way. It's stupid beyond belief.
I wonder how many people here mix their drink and drugs, and how much that contributes to bad behaviour. One New Year's, we helped someone who'd had some kind of a fit and it turned out that she'd been drinking and smoking. The Dutch people were full of "tsk". Wingnut theorised it's because they get a better education with regard to drugs.
On the face of it, this sounds like a good idea. Drunk people are a nuisance and especially so in the enclosed spaces of public transport. However, this is again an example of a politician introducing a new policy where the old rules were perfectly adequate, if only someone would bloody well enforce them.
I would be delighted if there was a concerted move to chucking obnoxious drunks off the Tube, but this penalises well-behaved alcohol drinkers too. Maybe I lived in the Netherlands for too long, but I don't automatically start twitching when I see someone on the train with a beer in their hand.
Also, the Mayor was apparently in such haste to bring in the ban, that he neglected to consult with the transport staff who would have to enforce it. To be fair, I don't expect the transport unions to have that much love for Boris but this was asking for trouble.
On the "other side", the Labour home secretary has ignored her own experts' advice and will reclassify cannabis back from class C to class B, which includes drugs like speed. The sentencing guidelines for dealing class C and B drugs are pretty similar, by the way. It's stupid beyond belief.
I wonder how many people here mix their drink and drugs, and how much that contributes to bad behaviour. One New Year's, we helped someone who'd had some kind of a fit and it turned out that she'd been drinking and smoking. The Dutch people were full of "tsk". Wingnut theorised it's because they get a better education with regard to drugs.