Pubs are part of resolution
Support for pubs will help preserve a uniquely British institution, as well as redirect the often-misguided fight against alcohol abuse.
My new year resolution is a simple one: I intend to go to the pub more often. It's part of my one-man campaign against the killjoys, the moralising do-gooders and the snooty medical profession that unite in their dislike of alcohol.
Their message is that anyone who enjoys a drink is going to hell in a handcart. They are backed by a malignant part of the media that endlessly fulminates against pubs and paints a distorted picture of problem drinking in this country.
My determination to occupy the bar stool in my local on a more regular basis is backed by two sensible articles from radically different sources, the right-wing Spectator magazine and the liberal Guardian.
In the Spectator (30 December), Leah McLaren castigated the Drinkaware Trust, a body funded in part by two supermarkets, Tesco and Waitrose, which is spending £100m on a campaign to highlight alcohol misuse. Among the trust's suggestions are serving water at dinner parties, starting the day with a long walk and eating more bananas.
You have to admire the brass-necked cheek of Tesco, which piles its aisles high with cut-price booze, in supporting such a laughable campaign. But no doubt the group will hope to sell more bottled water and bananas as a result.
As McLaren points out, these suggestions would have no impact on a serious alcoholic while the Drinkaware campaign ignores the fact that the overwhelming majority of British people drink sensibly and moderately.
McLaren also points to the muddled and confused messages that come from the medical profession. Pregnant women used to be encouraged to take moderate levels of alcohol — Guinness in particular was considered a beneficial tonic — but now the message is don't touch a drop until the umbilical cord is cut.
What are now called "dangerous levels" of drinking in Britain, McLaren adds, would be considered normal consumption in France and most other European countries.
The constantly changing attitudes of the medical profession was underscored last year when one of the "experts" who in the 1980s handed down the number of units of alcohol it was safe to drink each week admitted they had no idea and just plucked some figures out of the air.
In the Guardian on 8 January, Richard Reeves of think tank Demos says there's no denying economic and social costs associated with drinking alcohol, but "there is another side to the ledger. Alcohol brings significant benefits… In the UK, taxes on alcohol and the sector provide £15bn to the Exchequer (far more than the costs of the NHS). The hospitality industry employs 650,000 people. Alcohol is a long-standing ingredient of human societies. Our Lord didn't turn the water at Cana into refreshing carrot juice."
Back in the Spectator, Leah McLaren stresses the healthy benefits of alcohol and quotes Professor David Hanson, a sociologist at New York State University where he is an expert on the sociology of drink. Hanson says the British Government's statistics on unhealthy drinking are wildly exaggerated.
"There's this idea that almost any alcohol is bad. You've got this idea that alcohol is poison and that we need to reduce consumption and that will solve all our social problems. That simply doesn't bear out historically. In the US, for example, Prohibition actually introduced the practice of heavy drinking by making liquor an illicit substance."
McLaren's wisest words concern the pub: "Britain's finest institution… the local pub might well be the Government's best weapon when it comes to getting young people to 'drink safe' or 'know their limits'."
As the British Medical Association has started the new year with a call for a complete ban on alcohol advertising and there's no let-up in the media obsession with binge drinking, let's marshal our arguments against the killjoys.
Britain is a moderate country where alcohol is concerned — number 16 in the world table of consump-tion. Moderate drinking can have health benefits: both red wine and beer can help counter heart attacks and strokes while the natural chemicals present in the hop plant may play a part in preventing some forms of cancer.
Increasing the price of alcohol won't stop the tiny minority of alcoholics, who will look for cheaper and possibly lethal alternatives. And, as Richard Reeves points out in the Guardian, increasing the price of alcohol will hit the poorest members of society: "the bottom 10% of the income distribution who spend just £5 a week on alcohol.
"Meanwhile, the richest would see little or no change, since their £28 weekly drinks bill is made up of purchases well above the proposed minimum per-unit price."
Reeves ends with a call to arms: "The 19th-century temperance movement was defeated by an alliance of liberals and the working class, and it looks like a repeat performance might be required.
"A prohibition bill was quashed in the Commons in 1859, the year in which John Stuart Mill's On Liberty savaged the 'beer house purism' of the religiously inspired anti-alcohol lobby. Mill, not exactly a binge-drinker himself, recognised the costs of alcohol in terms of some disorder and lessened security, but thought that these were costs 'which society can afford to bear, for the sake of the greater good of human freedom'."
I'll drink to that. Mine's a large one. What's your poison?
