Come on, it is OK to enjoy a drink

Why can't the trade run a "get-punters-back-in-pubs" campaign? It's a question we've posed with increasing urgency in recent months. But the answer, we now learn, is our leaders want to spend millions on yet another responsible-drinking campaign instead.

As reported last week, a new consumer campaign aimed at changing attitudes to drinking is under way. Project 10 will be unveiled in the first half of next year. It is the trade's response to being summoned to Number 10 Downing Street and told by the PM to get its house in order. On the effectiveness of this campaign may lie the fate of the drinks industry and its ongoing ability to promote alcohol under a framework of voluntary self-regulation.

As a trenchant supporter of responsible drinking, the MA is normally the first to applaud such initiatives. But it seems odd so much money is being committed by our team — to the detriment of other, more positive initiatives — when the industry already spends millions on the Drinkaware Trust, which is meant to do exactly what Project Ten is charged with doing; when the industry already spends further millions on safe drinking messages; and when the Government is spending millions itself on the same. So why the need for yet another safe drinking campaign?

At the heart of our concern is a fear that drinking alcohol at all is becoming so stigmatised the trade can never again say anything positive about this life-enhancing elixir. Suggesting it's fun to drink, that drinking makes you feel good, and that the often grim business of living can take on a rosier hue if you've had a drink is now so verboten that the game seems almost up for all of us in this industry. Pubs might as well all become coffee shops — far safer than risking the wrath of officialdom, or the disapproval of consumers scared off alcohol by the ubiquitous propaganda of the anti-alcohol brigade.

The New Puritans have surely won when the trade is apologetic about promoting its wares. Yet that is the sorry state we appear to be in, with no-one prepared to state that what people like about our product is that it can make you happier, friendlier, more relaxed, and that there's nothing wrong about occasionally over-indulging (as long as all that suffers is one's head, naturally).

Difficult messages to get across, admittedly. And maybe producers can stay silent on the basis that alcohol's qualities are so well known there's no danger of it ever going out of fashion. Possibly.

But teetotalism is rising and will continue to rise unless alcohol can regain its confidence.

Maybe, just maybe, Project Ten can address all the positive attributes of drink as well as its pitfalls. In which case, the millions will have been well spent after all. But in these times, that's a very big ask.