Pete Brown: 'Hang on CAMRA, I thought you were on our side…'

I'd rather have an effective campaigning organisation, successfully promoting great beer and giving it a positive image, than an easy target for cheap gags, any day. And doubling membership in the past 10 years is no accident - CAMRA is clearly doing a great deal that's right.

But just when you think CAMRA has successfully reinvented itself, it says or does something that embarrasses you so much it reminds you of your senile granny's racist outburst at your cousin's wedding.

I came across this one by chance, while reading the mainly excellent BEER magazine. At first I thought it was a misprint: CAMRA supports a ban on advertising by international brewers.

That makes no sense. On its website, CAMRA describes itself as 'the consumer's champion in relation to the UK and European beer and drinks industry'. Advertising helps that industry promote itself, and drinkers love watching beer ads even if they don't always like the beer being advertised. In what possible way would a beer advertising ban — even a partial one — be in the drinker's interest?

But a bit of digging revealed it's true. The exact wording in CAMRA's draft policy document is "CAMRA would support moves to prohibit or restrict global alcohol producers from advertising their global or international brands. CAMRA, however, defends the right of non-global brewers to promote and provide information about their products."

Last week CAMRA's head of policy, Jonathan Mail, confirmed to me that CAMRA does indeed support 'restrictions on advertising by global alcohol producers'.

It's difficult to know where to start in response.

There are only two possible reasons why a 'beer drinker's champion' might be anti-beer advertising.

The first is that CAMRA agrees with the neo-Prohibitionists that alcohol advertising leads to harmful and/or underage drinking. They'd be wrong to do so: despite the frequency with which this is claimed, and despite a raft of studies attempting to prove such a link, there is NO CAUSAL LINK between advertising and harmful or underage drinking. And believe me, they've tried really, really hard to find one.

So as well as empowering those who want to see severe curbs on our industry, it's also factually incorrect.

But perhaps CAMRA is not suggesting that alcohol advertising is harmful. Perhaps they think that this theoretical partial advertising ban — which would somehow need to be worked out according to the size of brewer and geographical footprint of their brands — would help small brewers grow at the expense of larger ones. More understandable, perhaps — this train of thought is merely astonishingly naïve, rather than openly hostile to the pubs and drinkers CAMRA claims to support.

Without big lager brand campaigns, the ads for regional ale brewers would not magically become any more noticeable in our overcrowded media landscape than they are now. Beer as a whole — and the pubs that serve it — would be less visible. It's impossible to see a way in which this might benefit small brewers.

Most pubs — even those serving fantastic quality real ale — also need to sell international lager brands. At a time when pubs are under attack from all directions, an advertising ban would decrease overall demand for beer by making it less visible, with less social currency — and this would simply help accelerate pub closures.

And if by some bizarre chance such a partial ban came into being, there would be immediate pressure from the neo-Pros to extend it from international brands to national brands, from national to regional, to a total blanket ban. Those who hate alcohol and alcohol advertising do not discriminate by size of brewer — in their eyes, a pint of Crouch Vale Brewers' Gold is no less 'harmful' than a pint of Foster's.

CAMRA's support for such a policy is an easy victory for the neo-Prohibitionists and an outright betrayal of the drinkers CAMRA claims to represent. It's about time this 'drinker's champion' started fighting back against the constant slurs against brewers and beer drinkers, instead of agreeing with those who attack us.