Eat, Drink & Keep Drinking

Eat, Drink & Keep Drinking

There’s much ado about drinking these days. We, the British people, allegedly have a binge drinking problem. The current debate has focused on how this problem is to be solved, and thus far several solutions have been mentioned: Firstly, some reckon that pubs and clubs should be able to open as late as they want, so as to stagger (no pun intended) the going home times of pubbers and clubbers, and avoid the last orders rush to drink 5 pints in 15 minutes. Secondly, it has been suggested that pubs and clubs should pay some kind of annual government fee because, so the argument goes, pubs and clubs contribute to the social disorder supposedly caused by our national drinking problem. Along with this suggestion some people suggest that licensees should be fined for serving drunks “merely,” writes one ex-policeman, “on proof that theirs was the last premises visited by a person subsequently arrested for drunken behaviour.”

Writing in The Times, Simon Jenkins (who occasionally enjoys parading his libertarian credentials) commented that he has never once heard a good argument in favour of longer pub opening hours. From my side of the fence it seems to me that Simon is being a tad simple, seemingly having thought or read little about this issue. He does not seem to grasp just how preposterous it is for government to dictate to the adult population what time they may go out and have a drink. Pubs and clubs should be entitled to open whenever they wish until such time as someone produces good reason why they should not do so. Simple Simon bases his sloppy argument against longer pub opening hours on the notion that Britain “doesn’t have a Continental drinking culture.” It never crosses Jenkins’ mind that our current laws with regards to opening hours could be a major factor in British drinking culture. I used to frequent a local social club on Friday nights with my father. An average night tends to go a little like this: Everyone sits and drinks, and generally has a great time. All of a sudden “ding-a-ling-a-ling” “LAST ORDERS!” For the next 5 or 10 minutes you feel like a rugby ball that’s just been thrown into a scrum. It’s brutal. Whereas before when you bought five pints they were for you and your four friends, you now find that you’re buying five drinks each. A short time later the bar staff are trying to clear the everyone out, so you’re downing Guinness at a rate that would get you into the record book of the same name. Half an hour ago you staggered a little on the way to the toilet, but now you’re blind and can’t even find it. It is at least plausible to suppose that such a state of affairs would not exist if pubs were able to open later. You’d more likely get tired or get the munchies long before going blind and pissing yourself.

Not so long ago Australia used to require the closure of pubs at 6 o‘clock. When motions were tabled to liberalise the drinking laws many of the same arguments currently employed by people like Simon Jenkins were used to resist the move. However, liberalisation came and, to a great extent, drinking related problems went into decline.

Simple Simon waffles on (smuggly telling us that every, yes EVERY, expert is in agreement with him) that liberalisation of drinking laws will simply lead to an increase in alcoholism and binge drinking. Aside from the fact that one of the most distinguished researchers into alcohol and its effects on society - Professor Dwight Heath - says that there is no proven positive correlation between the availability of alcohol and our propensity to abuse it, Jenkins makes a more basic error. The Great Libertarian seemingly makes a rather un-libertarian assumption: that government has a legitimate role to play in saving people from themselves, with the implication that we are children who need a teacher to patrol our playground to prevent us from hurting ourselves too badly. It’s the same faulty argument that people who resisted a relaxation of gambling laws used: you’ll get more “problem gamblers.” The population of the country is effectively being treated like a giant class of school children who would be better off doing as their told by those who know better and who have our best interests at heart. It reminds me of the words of C.S. Lewis: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

The libertarian does not, and should not, buy into such a premise, one which inevitably leads to greater government involvement in many other aspects of our lives. For the true libertarian people should be free to completely balls up their lives if that is what they wish to do. Libertarianism allows people choice and the responsibility that goes with it. If people choose to screw themselves up, so be it. It’s their life. Moreover, a libertarian would certainly not agree with Jenkins’ call for a massive increase in alcohol duty. Instead, government should stay out of such economic matters, which are, after all, private business transactions between individuals. One person or group offers a product at a certain price and other individuals or groups decide whether they wish to purchase those products, go elsewhere, or abstain altogether. It is not a legitimate task of government to police such relationships. Government’s sole function is to protect the rights of it’s citizens, particularly the right to life and property. Taxing alcohol does not protect the rights of individuals - it breaches them by illegitimately taking (read stealing) the property of individuals.

Thankfully, a libertarian principle is not merely sound in theory but actually works in practice. Many studies suggest that, with regards to alcohol, the more liberty, the less dysfunctional the behaviour of the population will be towards it.

In any event, I often wonder about the severity of the nation’s supposed drinking problem. Having frequented numerous drinking dens on numerous occasions I must say that I have hardly ever witnessed the kinds of scenes that seem to concern so many people: particularly violent and aggressive anti-social behaviour. Of course the media can, and do, easily make things appear worse than they actually are. By beaming a few pictures into our homes - some punter puking into grandma Jones' garden, some scantily clad biddy rolling on the pavement with her knickers in the air, or some scrawny little idiot getting mauled by the police as he foolishly tries to assist arrest - with the 6 o’clock news, the media creates the impression that this is how things are all over the nation rather than telling the truth: these are largely isolated incidents, caused by a minority of people in a minority of places, and carefully filmed, chosen, edited and broadcast by a media rampaging on with its agenda of hyped-up news and shock tactics, appealing largely to the people who wouldn’t be seen out at a pub or a club any time of day or night: people I like to call “the head shaking tut-tutters.” I strongly suspect that this is the case.

MCM Research recently relayed a report on binge drinking. The report brought together scientific study and interviews with a whole range of people - police, bar staff, alcoholic councillors, and drinkers - and concluded that binge drinking was not getting worse, as the media would have us believe, and is as far from being an “epidemic” as Ian Paisley is from Roman Catholic doctrine. This report barely saw the light of day. The media, and those it manipulates, had already drawn their conclusions.

Part of this media circus inevitably involves laying some, often most, of the blame at the doors of bars and clubs. This always amuses me. If you’re fat: blame McDonalds. If you’re too drunk: blame the nightclub owner. If you’ve got no money: blame corporate advertising. Blame anyone but yourself, and in particular blame a company or corporation - the bigger the better. It’s this mindset that comes up with suggestions such as fining McDonalds when burger wrappers are found lying on the street, taxing chewing gum companies because people spit their products on the pavement, and fining alcoholic establishments because someone comes out drunk and engages in anti-social behaviour. The fatal flaw in the latter notion is fairly obvious: drunk people don’t always buy their own drinks at the bar, and to claim, as the ex-policeman mentioned at the beginning does, that the only proof needed is that “theirs was the last premises visited by a person subsequently arrested for drunken behaviour” is quite ludicrous, because in most instances the only evidence the police would have of the last premises visited by a misbehaving drunk is the word of the drunk in question.

People should be responsible, and held responsible, for their actions. If you’re fat: you’ve eaten too much and haven’t moved enough. If you’re drunk and disorderly: you’ve consumed too much alcohol. It’s your own fault and the police should treat it that way. There would be no quicker way to have people change their habits and behaviour than to make them feel the full consequences of it themselves. One step along the right path would be to stop legal defence teams getting people off with lesser charges “on the grounds of diminished responsibility.” Crimes committed when a person is drunk should be treated as severely as those committed whilst sober.

So, as with similar issues, I find that the best approach would be to simply trust the vast majority of responsible people who know how to conduct themselves when out drinking, and to come down hard upon those who do not.

Stephen Graham (B.Th Hons)

BBC Licence Fee: The Opera

BBC Licence Fee: The Opera

What the Fucking Fucking Fuck?

One of the things that makes me love a film or piece of theatre is the quality of the dialogue. In Jerry Springer: The Opera, the dialogue didn’t quite grip me. “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fucking fucking fuck” is funny the first time you hear it sung opera style, but it loses some effect after a while, (as do descriptions of the Devil as a “Cunty Cunty Cunty Cunty Cunty Cunty Cunt”).

I watched the first 30 minutes of this programme before changing the channel. I wasn’t offended by the language. I was bored. Billy Connelly’s tour of New Zealand was much more interesting (with not much less swearing in parts). I turned it back to Jerry about 30 minutes before the end, just in time to see Jesus, dressed in a nappy, being told to “Fu-Fu-Fu-Fu-Fu-Fu-Fu-Fuck off” by the Devil. I watched about 15 minutes more and then went to bed before I conked out on the sofa. Boredom defined.

The media circus that surrounded this piece of televised theatre (which drew a paltry 2 million viewers) was much more entertaining. Christians protested in their thousands (45,000 complaints were made even before the programme went on air), and, even more amusing The Sun (you know, that upright guardian of the nation’s morals) had a campaign going against the show, in which it told us just how many F***’s and C’s there were. Very nice of it to protect us from gratuitous use of vowels and consonants don‘t you think? “uck” can after all be a deadly combination of letters for word-ending, from which we are best protected, and “unts” are specifically brutal.

There were two central complaints about the programme:

The first complaint was that the programme used excessive “bad language.” I was always at a loss to grasp the notion of “bad language.” Why is “crap” more acceptable than “shit”? They mean the same thing: the browny-black stuff (depends on what you’ve been eating I suppose, I managed greeny-yellow on a few occasions - damn those kebabs) that comes out of your ass on average 2 times a day. Why would saying “my job is rubbish” be more acceptable than “my job is shitty?” The purpose of words is communication. They convey meaning. In my example above there is little difference in meaning, if any at all. Words themselves have no moral bias: they can be neither inherently wrong/bad, nor inherently right/good. It all depends on the context. Telling your mate in the pub to go and fuck himself when he jests about shagging your mother is altogether different from angrily telling a 4 year old child to go and fuck itself when it asks for some dinner. And, obviously, we could be equally nasty in such a case without using “swear words” at all. There is, of course, a tendency for some people to overuse words such as fuck or shit, and I agree that the overuse of words is a bad thing - often a sign of a limited vocabulary. However, this is not a moral wrong about which to get vehemently upset. At best it’s linguistically bad, and would apply to the overuse of any word, not just the so-called “swear words.” However, in the case of Jerry Springer: The Opera, the overuse of such words was perfectly justified, given the fact that the show was a parody on the actual Jerry Springer show, in which such language is almost always overused by those people who are stupid enough who appear on it. I think, therefore, that the complaint about language is a ridiculous one that relies on the idiotic notion that some words are “bad,” “wrong,” or “immoral.”

The second complaint was that the programme included religious blasphemy, especially in it’s portrayal of Jesus, who appeared as a fetishist dressed in a nappy, confessing to be “a bit gay.” This complaint has far more substance to it than the first one. The Director-General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, seemingly commenting from his rosy-red home in La-La Land, said: “I’m a practising Christian but there is nothing in this I perceive to be blasphemous.” This is utterly bizarre. Jesus the fetishist. Jesus the “little bit gay” Jesus the “having his bollocks fondled by Eve.” It doesn’t take a genius to understand why some (most?) Christians might be offended and annoyed at such a (certainly blasphemous) portrayal of Christ. That the portrayal was merely part of a dream sequence is hardly any rebuttal of that charge. So angry were they that Christian protesters stood outside BBC offices burning their TV licences. Unfortunately some people chose to totally ignore the complaints and dismiss those who were making them as anti-freedom of speech reactionaries. I certainly disagree with the protesters about the notion of “bad language,” and with the idea that a programme containing blasphemous or any other content that religious or secular people find offensive should be banned. What I did agree with however was with the charge that the BBC would not dare show a programme that portrayed Mohammed in the way that Christ was shown (for fear that more than licences would be burned outside BBC offices).

Yelling at the protesters to change the channel if they don’t like what they are watching misses the point. Most of these protesters are part-funders of the BBC and thus, like every other licence fee holder, have a right to a say in the running of the BBC. It is the existence of the forced licence fee that complicates this debate. It should always be acceptable to attack any religion, political theory, philosophy, ethical system or other ideology. If it’s on a commercial channel then you don’t have to watch. You change the channel and have lost nothing. However, with the BBC whether or not you change the channel, you’re still paying your licence fee. This is a problem. Why should Christians, or anyone else, have to suffer in silence when money taken from them by force is funding shows contrary to their morals and beliefs? These protesters were not essentially anti-free-speech. They just don’t want to fund something they don’t like.

Writing in The Times, William Rees-Mogg argues that “In terms of public policy. . . the question is whether the BBC ought to be broadcasting blasphemous attacks on any religion.” This simply misses the point. The central question is whether the BBC should continue to be funded in the way that it is: the licence fee, paid by anyone who owns a TV, whether or not they want to make use of any of the BBC’s services (many of which people might not even be able to receive if they have no internet access or digital service). No-one in the BBC, nor any supporters, have been able to satisfactorily answer the question as to why people should be compelled to buy the BBC’s services if they do not want to do so.

The licence fee is increasingly unpopular. No surprise there. £121 migrates on an annual basis from our pockets to the BBC coffers, to the tune of over £2 billion a year, and it doesn’t return to us again. I often wonder why there is not more of an uproar about this. Whether or not you wish to watch the BBC you are compelled by law to fund it by virtue of merely owning a television set, on pain of a £1000 fine. “What the fucking, fucking fuck?” I hear you say. With the move to digital TV, viewers are being offered more and more channels and more and more choice about which channels they receive. Why should we be compelled by law to fund a television service we may not actually want?

The BBC is attempting to defend the licence fee by using the “public service broadcaster” argument. It seems that virtually anything can be justified these days by prefixing to it the words “public service.” Just what in the name of Eastenders is a “public service broadcaster?” Looking through the TV guide I see countless similar programmes on a whole host of stations, none of which charge me £121 a year whether I like it or not. Moreover, many of these similar programmes are exactly the type of thing that the BBC tells us fulfils its public service remit. The BBC isn’t unique in any way whatsoever, and even if it was unique this would still not justify forcing people by law to fund it.

“Public Service Broadcaster” apparently means showing programmes that are “in the public interest.” A glance down the TV and Radio guide makes nonsense of this notion as applied to the BBC. Take the main TV channel – BBC 1: is it in the public interest to know if Zoe and Dennis will finally get it together in Eastenders? Is it essential public knowledge that some Kenyan with an unpronounceable name has won a gold medal for running countless miles without stopping? Or is it important for us to be aware of what the Joneses thought of the Smyth’s painting their living room shocking pink in yet another make-over show? Very little of the BBC’s schedule can seriously be defined as “in the public interest.” However, even if something is “in the public interest,” this still would not justify a licence fee. Many other channels show programmes that are “in the public interest” and yet they receive no financial assistance for doing so. With so many media outlets in existence there is nothing essential on the BBC that isn’t mirrored elsewhere in the free market.

As with any service, the user is best placed to decide which service he or she wants and needs, and thus to decide which services he or she hands their hard-earned cash to. If someone doesn’t want to watch the BBC there is absolutely no basis on which to compel him by statute to fund it. Why is the principle of “pay your money, make your choice” so difficult to understand?

There are many valid ways of funding the BBC – for instance, through subscriptions, or through the selling of advertising – just like 3/5 of our main domestic channels do, and they do well. The BBC is a good television station. It can and should compete in a free market. It would be better for them and better for us if it did. But do you think the cunty cunty cunty cunts will comply with this most basic of principles?

Stephen Graham (B.Th Hons)

Rant of a Heartless Bastard

Rant of a Heartless Bastard

The Anti-Christ has arrived in all his glory. It’s me. Cruel, heartless, cynical me. I have lost so much respect this week in the eyes of many members of my family and friends. And what accounts for my being labelled with various expletives and sent to Coventry?

My rants about the coverage of the Tsunami in Asia. Decide for yourself……

The Asian tsunami. I’m sick of hearing about it. Not just hearing about - hearing about it all the bastarding time. (“Stephen, “bastarding” isn’t technically a word” - FUCK OFF!!!). And not just hearing about it all the time - hearing about it in the superlative terms used by the media. Tonight I was told the disaster was “apocalyptic.” It clearly isn’t apocalyptic: I’ve seen no horsemen, no lakes of sulphur, and no big Satanic beasties coming out of the sea to terrorise us all. We were also informed that the aftermath of the disaster is “Hell on earth,” that this was “the worst tragedy in recent history,” and “no-one has seen anything like this in living memory.”

My bullshit alarm rang for practically the entire duration of the 6 o’clock news. I can think of several tragedies worse than this in recent history: 2 million dead in 2 weeks as a result of genocide in Rwanda, millions dead in two world wars - both of which are still very much a part of living memory - to name just a few. Why does the media feel the need to hype the news up to the bloody moon? In fact, the media is the reason why we’ve all given so much to this disaster. We’re not terribly compassionate at all - just incredibly pliable and easy to manipulate. Who gave money to help rebuild war-torn Bosnia? Or famine stricken Somalia? Or to aid the suffering of the thousands of people through-out the world dropping like flies from all manner of illness and plight every day of the friggin’ week? Don’t expect me to consider you a compassionate angel because you gave your pocket change to the Black Santa. You’re more likely a mindless zombie with dysfunctional grey matter.

Certainly so if you bothered with the 3 minutes silence today. What in the name of all that is good and pure was that about? 3 bloody minutes? Dear God. The frickin’ First & Second World Wars combined get a mere 60 seconds. I was always at a loss as to what this sort of grief expression was for. Just what on earth are you meant to think about during those three minutes? During periods of silence I normally just get an insane urge to burst out giggling. Even worse, I spend the most part longing for the silence to end so as to release, without embarrassment, the air that inevitably gathers in my large intestine and moves threateningly towards my rectum during such periods. But seriously, what are you supposed to think about during a three minute silence? Just be quietly thankful that nature didn’t kick your bollocks in too? Try to send happy thoughts New-Age-Style to the west coast of Indonesia? Or perhaps we might try to solve the theistic problem of evil? Or disprove the existence of God?

Well, on that point, I’m also getting sick to death of religious and non-religious folks alike using disasters like this to push their relative dogmas. “It’s a real challenge to our faith” waffles some prick in a cloak, with a poker up his arse and a mouth full of toffees, who calls himself the Archbishop of Canterbury. What, death is a challenge to your faith? Did people not bloody die before a tsunami hit Asia? “This confirms what we already knew - there is no God,” writes some equally intolerably smug fuckwit from the British Humanists. So you might have contemplated God’s existence in the absence of an Indian Ocean earthquake? If the world was bit nicer God might exist? God give me patience with such types.

And patience also for the journalists at ITN with their apocalyptic bullplop. Nick somebody-or-other (Robinson?) interviewed Tony Blair today about the disaster. Apparently it was an issue for him that Tony Blair didn’t come back from holiday right away when disaster struck. Perhaps had he been in Phucket or Pee Pee he would have been home in a shot, but as it was he wasn’t, and didn’t. But, so what? What the hell was bloody Tony bastarding Blair going to do? (“Stephen, once more, Bastarding is not a word” - again, FUCK OFF!!!). Did it somehow hamper the relief effort? I’m not convinced all those suffering Asians really give a slithering shit whether or not Tony came home to address the British people. And are the British people so utterly incompetent that they can’t do a thing on their own without Tony’s say so and encouragement? Who really wants to listen to a moralising political opportunist waffling pious platitudes in our ears anyway. I for one was thankful to have a few days of Tony’s absence.

Even more maddening, Nick somebody-or-other then asked Tony Blair why Britain can’t follow the lead of the Germans and automatically pledge 200 or 300 million pounds towards the relief effort. I wish Tony had said: “because, Nick, that’s not our fucking money really, we stole it from all the millions of people in the country, and we really should give it back.” Or perhaps he should have said, “yeah, great idea Einstein! Lets follow everything the bleedin’ Krauts do. Pity we had Neville Chamberlain instead of you, we could have conquered Poland and most of central Europe 65 years ago.” But, regrettably, he didn’t. Instead he informed the nation that there “would be no ceiling” on the amount of money Britain would send. No ceiling? Holy shit. That’s a lot of money. Too much money. One ceilingless fund pot too much. (“Stephen, like “bastarding,” “ceilingless” is not a word” - FUCK OFF!”).

Needless to say, I’m in a bit of rage about all this bullshit. Media bullshit. Political bullshit. Religious bullshit. Over-mourning bullshit. Far to much bastarding bullshit (“Um, Stephen, yet again…” FUCK OFF!!!

Stephen Graham (B.Th Hons)

Charitable Tsunamis

The Charitable Tsunamis of Government

With the number of deaths in Asia hurtling towards 150,000, it may not seem like the right time to question the validity of certain donations to the relief effort. I’m fairly sure that some readers will consider me to be a complete bastard for what I am about to say, but hopefully most will draw the correct conclusions and actually get the point.

The British government recently pledged 15 million towards the relief effort. After sustaining huge criticism for “stinginess” it increased this amount of money to 50 million. Many, especially those on the political left, are still unhappy, seemingly because this is but a small fraction of the money given towards the war in Iraq, (isn’t it just getting a tad old to have the war on Iraq dragged into every other current affairs issue?). But, 50 million it is. So far.

How much should government give? Another 100 million? 200? 300? My own answer to this question goes in the opposite direction. Not only is 50 million far too much to have given, the original pledge of 15 million was too much also - 15 million too much. The government should not give a single penny of tax-payers money to any foreign aid effort, no matter how serious it is.

Before I am accused of being a total and utter heartless robot lacking all compassion, I should point out that I support 3 private charities all of whom are working on the front line in the wake of this disaster. I believe it is right to support the relief effort, and would go so far as to suggest that on such occasions there is a moral obligation for wealthy people to assist those who find themselves in such tragic circumstances through no fault of their own.

However, this does not mean that governments should get involved in pledging money. The central reason why this is so is that “government money” is not actually “government” money - it is my money and your money, and shouldn’t have been taken from us in the first place. The government has no money to spend on the victims of natural disasters except that which it raises through taxation. In order to give money to charity, the government first steals it from tax-payers. This state of affairs has existed for so long that most people now simply take it for granted. Someone once quipped that “there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes,” as if taxes are simply part of the natural fabric of things which cannot be changed or questioned. But it should be both questioned and changed.

Government has always forced tax-payers to give to all sorts of causes that it deems to be worthy: single mothers, homeless people, the unemployed, victims of natural disasters or wars, and so on. On what moral basis does government do this? What justifies it meeting a natural tsunami with a charitable one made up of tax-payers money? The money that I earn is the fruit of my labours and should not be taken from me against my will and redistributed to those government deems worthy of aid. It is my responsibility and my right to distribute my money as I see fit. If someone would rather keep all of their money for themselves and blow it on McDonalds food, useless gadgets, 900 TV channels and high-class hookers, then that is, or should be, entirely their prerogative. Unfortunately it isn’t.

I noted above that tax is taken almost as a natural occurrence in this world, and thus few people reflect much about the morality of it. But, there is another reason why we don’t like to question the notion of government distribution of our money for good causes: we don’t want to look like heartless bastards by disagreeing with it. Some people can’t seem to get their heads around the notion that one can support charity without agreeing with government taxation for that purpose. “Oh come on Ebenezer, these people are dying, what’s a little tax!!??” No one likes to run contrary to the gospel according to Saint Altruist. Politicians know that they can always appeal to, and exploit, the altruist within us. Who would disagree with the notion that those who are well off have a moral obligation to help those who don’t even have the basic necessities of life? I agree with that. However, what government does is turn this moral obligation into a legally enforced one. If we have a moral obligation to help the poor and unfortunates of this world then shouldn’t government tax us for that purpose? Well, no. It shouldn’t. The government does not exist to ensure that people live up to their moral obligations. It exists solely to protect the rights of its citizens, to protect them from crime and foreign aggressors. Taking our money and then giving it away to those who are less well off is not by any stretch of the imagination within the remit of government. The fact of the matter is that the wealth people have earned for themselves should not be forcibly sacrificed to provide for those who did not.

Unfortunately the distinction between moral obligations and legitimate legal obligations is rarely made, thus the vast majority of people are impotent in the face of the confiscation and distribution of their money by government. They think that it’s a legitimate government function, when in fact it’s theft.

The only action that government should take in terms of a response to this sort of disaster is to stop taxing the money donated to charities. Isn’t it great? The government taxes us to help out charities and also encourages us to give privately. However, what they’ll then do is tax the shit out of your donation, so when you thought you were giving to charity you are also dumping a portion of your donation into government coffers. Huge numbers of people are privately giving money in response to this disaster, and many will know little or nothing about giving in ways that allow the charities to claim back the tax on their donation. Perhaps the treasury could allow people to fill in Gift Aid forms retrospectively, and thus allow much more money to be spent on relief aid. Wouldn't the gospel according to Saint Altruist, so willingly preached by our noble representatives, also demand that?

It would be even better if the government were to stop taxing charities and individuals beyond what is necessary to uphold its legitimate functions of upholding and protecting individual rights, and allow us to spend our own money as we see fit.

Stephen Graham (B.Th Hons)