Boris Johnson On A Home-Brewed Issue

BORIS Johnson on who thought up this health warning on wine. The EU?

No, my friends, I must be honest, and I must tell you that this piece of nonsense was not generated in Brussels. It is entirely home grown.

It is the British Department of Health, in Whitehall, that wants a new label on every bottle of wine and every other alcoholic beverage, with a load of baloney about the risks to unborn children (not very great, frankly), the need to drink “responsibly”, the websites of various “drink awareness” organisations, and a load of bunkum about the piffling number of “units” the Government thinks a man and a woman can drink “responsibly” every week.

The whole project has been personally invented and pushed by Caroline Flint, a junior health minister, and you may reasonably be asking yourself why.

Why now? For well over 45 centuries the human race has been squeezing grapes and fermenting the juice into anything between seven and 15 per cent alcohol, and so producing the ecstatic drink that has been as sacred to every pagan religion as it is to Christianity.

As a great French historian has pointed out, the vineyards of France are perhaps the single greatest cultural legacy of the Roman empire, and it is now more than two millennia since people in Britain first became aware of the intoxicating powers of wine.

Anorak

Posted: 7th, June 2007 | In: Twitterings Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink