My name is Ruth and I'm a drinker. Not of the fall-down-in-the-street variety, but a consumer of way more wine than is deemed healthy. I'm not alone. Recent studies have pointed out the fact that the middle-aged middle-classes can shift considerably more alcohol than is good for their livers and memory banks.
In some instances, the intake leads to the kind of suburban domestic violence supposed not to happen in respectable circles but statistically as common as any other social group where alcohol matched to the wrong temperament produces not silliness but sinister abuse of physical power. What this group typically does not do, however, is maraud drunkenly round the city centre in the middle of the night chucking up whatever fast food was inadvisedly laid upon a base of vodka or beer. We are unlikely to be caught peeing or copulating in a doorway or carrying a weapon in the expectation of a territorial rumble.
It is the latter kind of social disorder on which the UK government focused yesterday as a review of extended drinking times down south was published. One conclusion was that later closing meant later public disorder. Now, there's a surprise. The nonsense parroted about more "civilised" drinking opportunities turning regular binge drinkers into pavement-cafe sophisticates has proved just that; ludicrous nonsense. So yet another bout of legal tinkering is promised with stiffer fines for sales to under-age drinkers and street drunkenness and more variations on the Asbo theme. Pray silence, too, for another internal departmental review into "possible links" between pricing promotions and crime and disorder.
Here's a better idea. Why not get the review team to pop into their pre-existing databases and dust down three decades of research on both sides of the Atlantic, all offering persuasive proof that the most effective means of curbing alcohol abuse is through price increases? One extensive study published in 2002 in the US sifted through a massive body of evidence and concluded that not only did price increases moderate drinking patterns, but that this was especially effective among the young. Not at all incidentally, it was able to review how price hikes reduced death rates in that age group over-represented in alcohol-related traffic accidents. Similar studies, including many from Scotland, have repeated that same insistent message.
So what we lack here is not knowledge but political will. No Chancellor of any hue has ever been prepared to raise taxes on alcohol enough to address the huge fall in real terms of the price of booze in the past 20 years, even though the accusation of Treasury self-interest could be avoided by ring-fencing the tax increases to fund programmes dealing with addiction. No government of any hue has stood up to a drinks industry which has signally failed to self regulate, and instead sticks a coy PS on expensive advertising suggesting we use their cheap products responsibly. The fallout from that serial cowardice has been the availability of lager in supermarkets cheaper than bottled water, and the expansion of the appalling alcopops market.
A cuddly, jokey name for a ploy that is absolutely no laughing matter, geared as it is to tempting young palates with sweeter alcoholic concoctions at an age when the real, raw taste would properly repel them.
Nobody bats an eyelid at replica football shirts for children still being emblazoned with the name of drink sponsors, planting the not-so-subliminal thought that sporting prowess and drink are natural bedfellows. Our own police chiefs this week talked in stark terms about how drink fuelled the Scottish gang culture with its casual use of knives and worse. Yet nobody has really taken on the monks who make a tidy fortune from the export of Buckfast, empties of which cheap but potent brew lie around the scene of many crimes.
As with so many areas of fiscal policy, Westminster bends the knee to big business. Prepare for ritual howls of corporate anguish if Alistair Darling's first budget tries to curb cheap drink sales. Yet that culture has instilled the habit among many binge-drinkers of tanking up at home before they even go over the threshold of the pub. Why not? The home brew is less expensive and the pub or club will still be there at 2am or 3am.
One of the other conclusions of the major US study was that it was important to target the young - not because older imbibers have the slightest fingerhold on the moral high ground, but because people who become heavy drinkers while young are more likely to be tomorrow's serious drunks.
Again, hardly rocket science - but backed by the solid empirical evidence legislators consistently and perversely ignore.
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