|
19 Mar 04 - 08:21 AM (#1140830) Subject: BS: Minister's Attention Span From: DMcG On "Question Time" last night, a question was asked about whether Britain's licencing laws were in part responsible for the culture of binge drinking. Tessa Jowell's responded with a typically politician's answer eventually saying that she and the government would look at licencing reforms if necessary to address the issue. All well and good, apart from the fact that she was Kim Howell's boss and seems to have completely forgotten that there is a major reform of the licencing laws recently passed but not yet implemented. It took the Lib Dem spokesman to remind her of this a little later. The military refer to certain types of missiles as "fire and forget" and this seems to be the way many ministers seem to approach making laws. I'm genuinely not sure whether this is reasonable or not. I am certain *someone* does need to be following up on the impact of changes, but should *ministers* have this as part of their responsibility, or should they always be focused on the current and future issues? |
|
19 Mar 04 - 08:50 AM (#1140853) Subject: RE: BS: Minister's Attention Span From: McGrath of Harlow There was a snippet in the paper the other day indicating that it is now expected that some parts of the licencing law will not be coming into effect after all. Of course that probably won't mean the bits we are worried about as musicians. But they're starting to think they've gone a bit far in liberalising drinking hours and that. You'd really think they'd have thought out that kind of stuff when they were legislating? Well, no you wouldn't actually - I think the cock up over the music end of the bill wasn't an exception, it was just that it was more obvious because it was about something we were specially interested in. |
|
19 Mar 04 - 11:38 AM (#1140992) Subject: RE: BS: Minister's Attention Span From: HuwG "Fire and forget", implies some sort of precision-guided weapon. That doesn't really match most politicians ideas or verbal skills. I would prefer to term their usual patter after the other type of imprecise suppressive fire: "Spray and pray". |