Tell me lies, tell me binge-drinking lies

You can't argue with facts - unless you have the moral high ground of health lobbies and Government interests behind you. Then you can peddle big fat porkies

I nearly got into a fight in my local the other night. I'd been telling the other regulars about my research into binge drinking when one of them took (nearly) violent exception to my findings. After twisting on the sharp end of the stick for a few uncomfortable minutes, I delivered my usual valediction ("Ah well, that's my ration"), drained my pint, and left.

What I'd been trying to explain was that the whole issue of binge drinking, it turns out, is a scare story with no basis in fact, got up by the health industry lobby to squeeze more funds out of the Government.

These are the facts.

The latest British Crime Survey figures show violent crime of all degrees of severity from serious assaults to non-injury scuffles down by a massive 45% from a peak in 1995.

The Office of National Statistics General Household Survey reports that the number of people regularly drinking more than the (admittedly arbitrary) Government safe limits has also dropped sharply since 2000 - down from 29% to 23% in men and by 5% to 12% in women. Consumption among the young also saw a sharp decrease: by 37% to 16.4 units among young men (aged 16 to 24) and by 29% to nine units for young women.

And according to Nielsen market research, overall national alcohol consumption has also started falling after a long period of increase.

Even the lurid CCTV and police video images of drunken youths fighting and vomiting in our town and city centres on Friday and Saturday nights turn out to be misleading. They're there all right, all over our TV screens on cheap clip-shows such as Street Wars. But according to Dr Peter Marsh of the Social Issues Research Centre — co-author in 1992 of the seminal study Drinking and Public Disorder — we have no way of making accurate historical comparisons about this sort of behaviour.

We simply don't know how much drunken fighting and vomiting used to go unseen and unreported in the more dispersed (and CCTV-free) pubscape of the past. But in the last 20 years the burgeoning city-centre night-time economy, with its branded bars and fast-food joints, has gathered all the fighters and vomiters in one place where they fight and vomit under the eye of the police and CCTV rather than unnoticed in alleyways and back streets and suburban pub car parks. The observation that drinking, fighting, and vomiting among the young is any worse than it was can, therefore, only be purely anecdotal.

But you can't tell people that. Not only did I nearly get into a barney in my local, but even Dr Marsh was accused of lying when he simply stated the facts during a radio debate.

The person who made the accusation was another doctor — a medical one this time — who as a man of science ought to have known better. So how did we get here, to a position where the entire public from the saloon bar to the studios of Radio 4 firmly believes that black is white and white is black and anyone who says different is a liar who deserves a good kicking?

The answer lies in the power and size of the health industry lobby. It is enormous, embracing a vast community that ranges from multinational pharmaceutical corporations down to your local GP. It has a huge advantage in that its public face is a caring one - although in fact doctors and nurses actually represent only a fraction of its members.

And of course its line of business

is one that is quite literally close to everybody's heart.

In recent years the health industry lobby has been able to set the media agenda by feeding journalists and news editors too lazy to check the facts with stories too sensational to pass up. And by setting the media agenda, of course, it sets the political agenda. Politicians of all persuasions compete only in the degree to which they can fawn on it.

But why should this lobby be distorting the facts so nakedly to persuade us that we are in the grip of a health crisis, which is at best impossible to demonstrate empirically and at worst pure fiction?

The answer is simple. This huge industry has, in effect, only one customer, only one source of income — and that is the Government.

It follows that governments (and, of course, voters) have to be permanently persuaded that things are bad and getting worse because the crude equation is: no problem = no funds. Unless binge drinking can be shown to be a grave and growing crisis, all the research grants and other public funds made to the plethora of institutes of this and that — not to say Alcohol Concern — will dry up. Put crudely, if they want to keep their jobs, they have to keep stirring.

To paraphrase the old saying, there are liars, damn liars, and there are lobbyists. And they don't stop being liars because they work for the nice doctors and nurses. They just become more effective liars because the fact that they work for the nice doctors and nurses makes them credible... and us gullible.

Will the point ever come when it's recognised that the health industry lobby does far more harm, both to other industries such as ours and to the freedom of the individual, than good? Maybe one day, but not this time. So stand by for the fallout from a horrible budget, and to everyone who loses their job as a result — the nice doctors and nurses are really sorry. But their lobbyists couldn't give a rat's.