Friday, 8 June 2007

Warning: This Government Is Bad For Your Liberty


Boris Johnson on the asinine government proposal to slap every bottle of plonk with a warning label:
For well over 45 centuries the human race has been squeezing grapes and fermenting the juice into anything between seven and 15 per cent alcohol, and so producing the ecstatic drink that has been as sacred to every pagan religion as it is to Christianity.

As a great French historian has pointed out, the vineyards of France are perhaps the single greatest cultural legacy of the Roman empire, and it is now more than two millennia since people in Britain first became aware of the intoxicating powers of wine.

In all that time, no government in history has yet thought the people so moronic that they needed to be told, on the bottle, that wine could go to your head.
But then, the British people didn't have such enlightened masters lording over them as now.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Up and coming labels:

Warning: These stairs slope at a downward angle; you may fall down them.

Warning: This knife contains a sharpened-down metal edge; running it up and down the palm of your hand may cause injury.

Warning: The man in the alley wearing a plastic bag on his foot, and who smells of onion soup, is not very sociable; befriend at own risk.

Anonymous said...

Just listened to him talking on Any Questions on Radio 4, and he said this. I totally agree with him on this point.

Boris Johnson has proven amazingly clever on almost every point he's talked about (except when he bashed videogames of course, but that's an easy mistake to make), and I reckon England with him as Prime Minister would be undeniably entertaining.

Shadowfirebird said...

Wine already has a warning label - it tells you how much alcohol is in it.