Liberation Day?

A couple of weeks ago Culture and Leisure announced that the Liberation Day 'funfair' will be scrapped. Well, huzzah for that!

Inevitably, a letter published in the Press yesterday rebukes the 'nanny culture' which is responsible for the funfair being 'banned'. I say inevitably, because the Press's slightly misleading inclusion of that word 'banned' in the headline on their original article was obviously geared to provoke this response, but that's beside the point.

The point being that 'banning' the funfair has nothing to do with 'nanny culture'. The funfair costs the taxpayer money, police time and organisational resources, plus of course it deprives the island's poor long-suffering petrol-heads of the use of a car park for a week (and how could we be allowed to forget that!) Last year's spectacle of stunningly ignominious chavvery was the end result of spending 14 years injecting these resources into a tawdry entertainment aimed at the lowest common denominator.

One can only hope that the time and money saved by ditching the funfair might be diverted to entertainments which do not result in a sea of pea-brained delinquents converging on Town, driving out anybody who doesn't like to spend their day tripping over beer cans into piles of vomit.

In any society, in any country, it's going to be difficult to play host to an all-out street piss-up without cutting families and vulnerable citizens out of the party. But Guernsey is a small place, and there isn't room for that kind of event without stomping on people's faces. So why stop at the funfair? Why is the Home Department still too weak-willed to impose some extra restrictions on where people can swig their brews?

On this face of it this goes against my libertarian instincts, but just perhaps it's because I feel the residents of St Peter Port have a right to walk around the streets without have to engage in a turf-war with drunken louts. Few would question that licensing laws exist to give the government the power to contain the anti-social consequences of alcohol - so why don't we use them where we most need them?

My prognosis for Liberation Day 2007 is better than it was two weeks ago, but even with that hideous boom-box scream-fest cut out of the equation, there is more work to be done. For the time being the irony will remain: Many Guernsey residents will still not feel the slightest bit free on Liberation Day.