Let us drink at the football

With regards to Andy Burnham's call for repealing the ban on drinking and watching live football...

 

Apologists for illiberal regulation often insist that the restriction on liberty is too small to worry about, that it is easy enough to get around and that, all things considered, it doesn’t really count as a ban at all. These arguments were all swiftly deployed last week. Martin Samuel, the Sunday Times’ “voice of sport”, explained that “It is not as if alcohol is not available in the stadium; just not in sight of the pitch”, as if being in sight of the pitch were not a prerequisite for watching a sporting fixture. The Guardian’s Barney Ronay told his readers that “if you really must drink, it’s not that hard to smuggle in the gin flask.” Don’t try to change the law, just break it! Both journalists resorted to implying that there is something wrong with anyone who resents being bossed around for no good reason. Ronay opined that “nobody really needs to be more drunk at football” while Samuel offered some sneering advice, saying: “If you can’t go 45 minutes without alcohol you should be in the Betty Ford clinic, not the Hill Dickinson Stadium.”

This is the same straw man argument that is sometimes used to justify banning alcohol on trains or banning vaping anywhere. “Can’t you just wait a few hours? What’s wrong with you?!” It flips the conversation from a debate about the appropriate limits of state coercion and puts the onus on the individual to explain why they “need” to do something. Of course nobody needs to have a drink while watching sport, but then nobody needs to watch sport. Life would be unbearably dull if we were only allowed to meet our physical needs. But we are not talking about drinking at eight in the morning or drinking in the workplace. We are talking about how people choose to spend their leisure time on a Saturday afternoon. Having a pint and watching a game of football is a perfectly reasonable thing to do at the weekend and it should be none of the government’s business.

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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