Gah. Despite my careful argument against, more people are saying that the way to curb underage drinking is to make it harder for people to legally drink.

Brilliant idea. Never mind that it would be trying to use a sledgehammer to crack nuts, because it wouldn’t work anyway, so it would be using a sledgehammer to crack unrelated nuts.

And it gets even worse:

Alternatively, he [arseface in chief columnist Jasper Gerard] proposes getting 18-year-olds to carry smart cards which record how much they have drunk each night and making it an offence to serve more alcohol to anyone under-21 who had already consumed more than three units.

What the freedom-fucking fuck? Make it illegal, and electronically enforceable, for an adult to enjoy more than one fucking pint of beer? The original idea was bad, but this is many, many times worse. This is right up there is ‘communism’ on the list of bad ideas…

And don’t go thinking that this is from a lunatic left fringe group. Actually, it is from a lunatic left fringe group, the problem is that they’re a lunatic left fringe group that generally floats ideas that the government want to see floating. So this is something that I can see actually being tried.

But how would such a smart card be enforced? I can only think of one proposal that would fit. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the tendering for the ID card included “running tally of drink drunk”.

File that as reason 287 why ID cards would be a bad thing.

As a random aside, just last night I was scaring a few under-18s with such a proposal. They were whining and bitching about not being allowed in, and I pointed out that there were several lout voices trying to ensure that they’d have to wait an extra three years. I may have misdirected them though, because they did go away hating LibDems…