ALL DAY LONG, THE BBC has run stories based on a top quack Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, who has hit out at pubs in the UK for supplying too big glasses of wine for the middle classes.
The drink lobby is already on the run – according to this story, the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers says that “customers need choice”.
Er, customers in pubs in the UK are like sheep that need shearing and if the giant chains that run the declining pubs here can get an extra pound or two out of us then they’re quite happy for us to be in their clip joints.
The Royal College of Physicians, however, are a worrying lot. Just a few weeks back, another lobby group of quacks said that all the advice they’d given about people having so many “units” of alcohol a day or week wasn’t based upon science and they had no evidence at all about how many “units” were safe for people.
The glass industry will be next to tip in, saying “consumers” should have choice about not just the quantity in their glasses, but the shape of their glasses. This is all a very British phenomenon. In the last few years, plenty of our civil liberties have been removed for all sorts of spurious reasons.
It is time that the Royal College of Physicians learned that they’re just a bunch of quacks, and no-one has voted them in. However venerable the organisation might be, it should butt out of things that don’t concern them, and start worrying instead about the quality of health care they offer in this country. And the state of the NHS, which is in a terrible state.
Doctors need watching more than publicans because the former trade has a say over life and death, while the latter trade can only say: “Your very clean glasses please.” Count your change in both cases. ♥
