Pub opening hours and a lack of critical thinking

Hi All,

Have been musing on the change to Britain's pub opening hours and the pathetic level of media debate accompanying it.

It strikes me that the media coverage in general has been overwhelmingly critical of the change, often hysterically so. In the course of what passes for argument, stats are often produced to show that trends in Britain's alcohol consumption and associated poor behaviour have been rocketing uncontrollably upwards in recent years.

Dan, Andy & I were talking about the importance of critical thinking the other day, and the lack of CT here is driving me nuts. It is no argument *against* change that the status quo is (a) unacceptable and (b) getting rapidly worse - in fact, quite the opposite.

Of course the unacceptability of the status quo may be an argument for a *different* change, but I have yet to see any serious discussion of what alternatives to the govt's plans should be (let me know if you have see good debates on this). Furthermore, although I have seen the following argument made plenty of times:

PREMISE Antisocial behaviour is related to drinking hours and alcohol availability.
CONCLUSION We should not be extending opening hours

... I have so far not once seen anyone advocate the other obvious conclusion, that opening hours should in fact be further restricted eg by closing pubs at lunch hours as they did a decade ago, or by bringing closing time forward to 10 or 9 o'clock.

Be interested in people's thoughts on the matter.

J

PS The lack of CT clearly hasn't finished. Here an article declares the matter closed a matter of hours after the law changed. So that's all right then.
Britain awakes to minimal hangover

PPS My own two cents. Britain clearly has a cultural problem with drinking, and there is no such thing as an overnight fix. But while things may be different in the provinces (Wembley?), in Central London an 11pm closing time for normal pubs is just ridiculous. Not long ago I was at a big restaurant meal near Trafalgar Square which finished at 10.50. We wanted one quick drink for the road. Yet no pub would let us in that near closing time, and every other place wanted a fiver a head to get in. There were some foreigners in the group, and it was frankly cringingly embarrassing that in such a supposedly cosmopolitan city you couldn't go into a bar for a drink without paying just to cross the bloody door.