hang my galloway high

In his fine poem “The
Maimed Debauchee”, Lord Rochester wrote. "So, when my days of impotence approach,
And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance
Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch
On the dull shore of lazy temperance,
Past joys have more than paid what I endure "

Thank goodness he didn’t have to endure this maladjusted Establishment that plunges us into one unnecessary war after another, an Establishment which, no doubt, has poor Polonius –“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” – spinning in his grave; yet presumes to tell us how much we should drink and smoke.
Fifteen years ago my income plunged to a couple of hundred a week but
it didn’t stop my craving for drink. I brewed a very decent beer for tuppence a
pint and found a source for bootleg gin at a fiver a bottle.
The feral young of today won’t be put off by an increase of two quid on half a bottle of vodka. They only drink on Fridays and Saturdays and that won’t change when the only place you can buy cheap booze is in the bars of the Palace of Westminster. Homemade beer kits will produce a drinkable,strong beer; and there are enough illicit stills springing up in our immigrantcolonies which provide vodka at a shilling a tot. In Wisbech, near here, there are lorries making weekly deliveries.
The Establishment says the success of the smoking ban proves that their regulations work. The smoking ban in pubs has dramatically improved health, it boasts. As
Christopher Booker has pointed out, one study after another has shown that
health risks from passive smoking are non-existent. One 1998 study concluded
that regular exposure to "environmental smoke" is equivalent to
smoking six cigarettes a year.
A seven-year study for the World Health Organisation the same year found the risk
of cancer from passive smoking was "statistically insignificant". Yet
if you look on the WHO website they now warn that passive smoking is a health
risk.
The largest study, based on 118,000 Californians between 1960 and 1998 and
published in the British Medical Journal in 2003, confirmed that smokers had a
"higher than average risk of mortality", but found their partners
were unaffected.
The anti-smoking lobby squealed at such unwelcome findings. But the most
conspicuous effort to refute them, by Professor Nicholas Wald, was found to
have been largely based on studies carried out in Japan and China, where the
epidemiology of lung cancer is quite different from that in the West.
Some years ago the Establishment warned us not to drink more than four units of
alcohol. Since then, one of the members of the Royal College of Physicians' original working party has admitted the figures were "plucked out of the air" in the
absence of any clear evidence about how much alcohol constitutes a risk to
health.
Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal and a member of the College's working party on alcohol, recalled that the committee could find "no decent
data" on the subject, but felt obliged to make a recommendation nonetheless.
He said: "They weren't really based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee."
Yet last week all this hard evidence was happily swept aside by the Gadarene rush
of the self-righteous. It didn’t prevent the Government telling how few units
will wreck our health. It also warned us that if we drink three glasses of wine
a day we have a fifty per cent chance of developing breast cancer. Its advice is, presumably,based on those discredited recommendations of yesteryear.
Columnist Dominic Lawson perceptively points out that the disgraceful brawling in the House of Commons bars has not been linked to the cut price booze offered there. Gooses, Ganders and sauce spring to mind.
The R4 programme “More or Less” discovered the number of units of alcohol consumed by the average British adult has dropped by 20 per cent over the past five years.

Why is the Establishment so gloomy? From Beijing to Bratislava, more of us are living longer, healthier and more comfortable lives than at any time in history; fewer of us are suffering from poverty, hunger or illiteracy. Pestilence, famine, death and even war, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are in retreat. My advice? Eat, drink eat and be merry.
Rochester put it so much better:
“I will such heat inspire,
As to important mischief shall incline.
I'll make them long some ancient church to fire,
And fear no lewdness they're called to by wine.
Thus statesman-like, I'll saucily impose,
And safe from danger valiantly advise,
Sheltered in impotence, urge you to blows,
And being good for nothing else, be wise..
My pains at least some respite shall afford
While I behold the battles you maintain
\Vhen fleets of glasses sail about the board,
From whose broadsides volleys of wit shall rain.

Nor let the sight of honourable scars,
Which my too forward valour did procure,
Frighten new-listed soldiers from the wars:

*****************************
MINISTRY OF Doohhh

The navy’s newest ship, the offshore support vessel Skandi Bergen, cannot be sent
to war. The civilian crew is not insured for battle.

UNFIT FOR PURPOSE
We are contemplating war with the Falklands, nuclear war between Israel and the
Arabs; the UK has an underclass which has little chance of escape from poverty
and an underground army of feral looters; massive changes are underway to a Welfare
State we have never been able to afford. And what is concerning Her Majesty’s
Opposition? How many members of the cabinet are millionaires; whether the Prime Minister hacked out on a policehorse; whether Cornish pasties should attract VAT; dinners for donors and whereand when the PM last ate a pasty. And the Government? They are advising us to store highly inflammable petrol in our garages and provoking panic over a strike by tanker drivers which may never happen. Now it looks as though it’s all down to George Galloway, a teetotaler, alas, but someone who can talk
brilliantly and walk about at the same time.

Of one thing we can be sure. None of the three major parties is fit to govern us.
They should pay us to get as drunk as they often are.