If you’re planning to stop off for a few pints on the way home from work tonight, watch out for a beady-eyed bloke nursing a Diet Coke in the corner. Every Friday and Saturday this month, plain-clothed police will be posing as drinkers in the nation’s pubs, waiting to slap an £80 fine on anyone who appears to be drunk. The scheme, to which the Home Office Minister, Vernon Coaker, has allocated £180,000, is intended to clamp down on drink-related violence in the run-up to Christmas.
Its absurdities are manifest. There is no legal definition of what constitutes drunkenness, in terms of milligrams of alcohol in the blood that could be measured with, say, a breathyliser - it will be down to the opinion of the police officer. So at what point on the spectrum between slightly squiffy and obnoxiously, steamingly stocious do you become liable for a fine? And what if you have the misfortune to encounter a bloody-minded – or prejudiced – officer?
The crime, surely, is not being drunk, but committing acts of violence or public disorder, against which there are adequate laws already. All this kind of measure will only reinforce the widespread perception that the generally law-abiding get clobbered if they step a millimetre out of line, only to find that when they’re on the receiving end of a robbery or assault, they’re given a crime number and referred to their insurance claims department.
It is a relatively trivial example, I know, of this government’s creeping tendency to blur the distinction between the law-abiding and the criminal by treating all of us as suspects; and its desire to want to regulate private behaviour that should be at the discretion of the individual. Which raises an interesting question: if you get fined for being three sheets to the wind, will you have to give a DNA swab and find yourself on the national database?
What next? Plainclothes cops in McDonald’s waiting to slap a fine on anyone deemed overweight and in possession of a Big Mac before they become a burden on the NHS? And, given the social ills caused by personal debt, why not post WPCs in the changing room at Harvey Nicks to pounce on anyone maxing their store card?
If they’re not on strike, that is…
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