Personal Blogs

The London Borough of Merton has recently designated the entire borough as a "controlled drinking zone". What this means is that, although it is not an offence per se to drink alcohol in a public place, if you do drink alcohol in a public place anywhere within the borough, a police or community support officer has the right to require you to stop drinking and to confiscate your drink. In fact, you don't even have to be drinking: you just have to have a bottle with you. Even an unopened bottle can legally be confiscated.

I find this worrying.

Controlled drinking zones (known by the legislation as "Designated Public Places Orders") were designed to reduce anti-social behaviour in specific areas where there was a problem. Stretching a zone to an entire borough seems an extraordinarily broad interpretation of the legislation, and may be open to legal challenge.

What worries me in particular is that this appears to be something that is aimed at restricting the liberties of the poor and marginalised. Technically, if I were to have a picnic in the local park with a nice bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, my bottle could be confiscated. But I bet it won't be, because I'm white, middle-aged, and middle class.

What do you think is likely to happen if a police officer comes across a black teenager from a deprived neighbourhood drinking a can of lager in the street? Maybe if the teenager is engaging in violent and abusive behaviour, that could be justified (though also completely unnecessary, as being violent and abusive is illegal in its own right). But I dare say there are teenagers from deprived neighbourhoods who can't afford to go to the pub who enjoy drinking a few cans of lager with their mates on street corners. In fact I've seen groups of youths out on the street doing just that, and I've never yet seen any of them causing trouble.

No doubt some people do cause trouble, but it seems totally disproportionate to restrict the liberty of those who don't just to tackle a problem of antisocial behaviour from a minority, especially as violent and antisocial behaviour can be tackled in other ways.

This won't lead to any great political fuss, because the people who are being harmed by this controlled drinking zone are those who lack political power. Most of them probably don't even bother to vote. So politicians don't care about their rights. As stated above, the controlled drinking zone may be unlawful. If it infringed the rights of the middle-classes, you can bet that there would have been a legal challenge by now. To the best of my knowledge, no-one is planning a legal challenge.

One of the Merton MPs, Siobhain McDonagh (who also happens to be my own MP) was tweeting about this the other day. It's clear she supports the policy.

I tried to ask her why she thought it appropriate for the ban to extend to the whole borough (3 times, in fact). In true politician form, she completely avoided that question, and instead answered the questions she'd liked me to have asked her. Here is how the conversation went (for ease of reading, I've arranged the tweets with the oldest ones at the top):

I find it very disappointing that my elected representative not only supports a policy that harms marginalised members of society, but also refuses to engage in a meaningful discussion about her reasons for doing so. Politicians sometimes express surprise that no-one trusts them. When they so stubbornly refuse to engage with the concerns of their constituents, is it any wonder?