Pete Brown: Make no mistake, this is a war on drink. We need to fight back
This is the month when many of us think, 'Sod it, it's going to be a miserable month anyway, I might as well lay off the sauce for a bit'. For those of us who drink habitually, it's about making the point that we're not dependent on alcohol - we can take a break from it if we want. We prove to ourselves that we don't have a problem.
But some people think we do. The British Medical Association classifies anyone who drinks more than the recommended daily unit allowance as a 'hazardous' drinker, suffering from an 'alcohol use disorder'. Yep, it's official - anyone who drinks, say, a pint-and-a-half of Kronenbourg in a day has a drinking disorder. All the doctors say so. It must be true.
Cynically, the pushers of this kind of twaddle used January 2010 to launch a full-scale war on drinkers. Just as we were proving we don't have a drink problem, people queued up to tell us we did.
Most of us hadn't even woken up on New Year's Day when the NHS Confederation launched the first salvo with a report that (erroneously) claimed the cost of alcohol to the NHS has doubled since 2001.
That was followed days later by the Health Select Committee Report on Alcohol, which demanded the introduction of the mandatory code, severe restrictions on alcohol marketing, minimum pricing, and much more. It called the Licensing Act of 2003 a failure, claimed binge-drinking was soaring, and that alcohol cost the country £55bn a year.
A week later, the Mandatory Code itself was unveiled, directing the majority of its ire at the on-trade. I spent a week dismantling the HSC claims on my blog (www.petebrown.blogspot.com). Most of what they claim is simply not backed up by evidence. In many cases, the facts actually contradict their claims.
But how did the drinks industry respond? The British Beer & Pub Association was critical, in a press release that was seemingly ignored. CAMRA said it welcomed minimum pricing, and has since offered no further comment on any other aspect. The Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers also confined its comments to welcoming minimum pricing.
No one in authority has yet gone out there and robustly challenged this astonishing attack - libellous in places - on people who make their living from selling alcohol or enhance their lives by consuming it.
Alcohol consumption in the UK is falling. Binge-drinking, under-age drinking, harmful drinking, alcohol-related disorder, are all falling - the official stats say so. But the neo-Prohibitionists are saying the opposite, and no one is arguing with them. The mainstream media has accepted every point as fact.
On ThePublican.com, publicans grumbled - with justification - about more red tape and administrative costs. But the danger to pubs goes far, far beyond that.
Make no mistake - this is a war on drink. The issue has been described as a 'battleground' for the general election. The problem with that description is that all main political parties are on the same side, competing over who can look toughest.
Their enemy is you and me. The battle plan is to make drinking socially unacceptable, to create an appetite that will support far more draconian measures than those currently being proposed. That's how the smoking ban worked. It took 40 years - with drink, it's happening much quicker.
We need to fight back. Together. And there's no time to waste.
