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Sounds fair to me......although i would prefer to see the £20 pint introduced asap....and no spirits sold to those under fifty....

It wouldn't work, but i do think its a good idea. trouble is if you aim to get drunk on a sat night you will do! regardless to th amount you spend!! well thats what most people do anyway. pubs are already very expensive if you go out in a city centre (on a night out).

Ridiculous.

The community pub has almost been killed off because of the smoking ban, and to put more charges on alcohol would mark their death knell.

The culture of "binge drinking" is not caused by community pubs - these have existed for over a century. Like the''Rovers Return' on Coronation Street, they are places where the community meets, chats and has a few pints.

It is possible for the person attending the type of pub that is being encouraged - to wit the food-oriented pub, to consume more 'units' of alcohol in the course of a meal than the average conversational drinker will imbibe in the course of an evening. Gastropubs are not keen on selling wine by the glass, and those wines that they sell by the glass are generally bloody awful. So one has to buy a bottle.

One starts one's meal with a Dubonnet or similar aperitif - 2 units.Half a bottle of Medoc with the main course - 8 or more units. Cognac or Drambuie with coffee afterwards - 4 units. 14 units per person.

5 pints of an average-strength bitter - say Greene King IPA - 10-12 units.

If Govt sods around with pubs much more then we will all stay at home and drink. We'll start distilling our own. We'll become a society of isolated people who cannot meet strangers in a social setting because these social settings have been, de facto, abolished.

Not all of us want to become members of the local stamp-collectors club in order to make friends; nor do we all have the means to buy an 8oz fillet steak so we can enjoy a pint of Adnams Bitter.

The problem is not with young and middle aged people having a few pints down at the local. The problem is with stand-up pubs with wall to wall din and floor to ceiling football TV selling shots, alcopops and heavily advertised foreign synthetic lagers to our youth. The problem is with corner shops selling ersatz vodka to 14 year old street drinkers.

It is certainly not with 52 year old me with my 5 pints of Pedigree and a quiet game of dominoes.

They can shove it where the sun don't shine.

It's the usual punish everybody attitude and it's not at all fair. We're not all drunken louts who spend our weekends fighting and vomiting although many of us enjoy a drink.
The answer is not the price of booze it's the opening hours that the Government introduced. Now they've screwed up they see an opportunity for a tax grab. It's always about tax in this country.

It was a bad idea, it would just make us poorer and not solve anything

Just another way to wring a buck from us. In my state, they're talking about raising the gas tax by 19 cents per gallon. When you pile on income, luxury, sales, gas, cigarettes, booze, property...all the taxes combined going "up and up and away in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon!" it feels like "stick 'em up" and we've got less and less to give. There's only so many times you can shake down a broke before we go bust.

Will it solve anything?

I think it might lead to more people drinking at home rather than going out, or drinking at home before they go out. Either of these has the potential to increase the amount people drink rather than reduce it.

If people want to binge drink then they will; they don't decide to drink because it's cheap and therefore a price hike won't stop them. I think the government should look at why we drink to much in the UK. Is it because we have the longest working hours in Europe and therefore more likely to suffer from stress? Why are so many people so unhappy that they risk all the health problems associated with alcohol just to escape from they're worries for a while?

When me and my friends go to a pub we think is overpriced we have been known to take our own drink in and sneak it into our glasses when no-one's looking! So I don't think the price hike will change how much problem drinkers drink, it will just make them more creative!

it has already been decided by govt that it isn't happening

as they think it's unfair to the social drinker

so case closed !