The Price of Drink

Last night on Newsnight there was a report that Scotland is about to increase taxation on alcohol in order to discourage binge drinking and an appalling increase in deaths due to alcohol. The SNP Minister for Health was interviewed stating that this was one of the measures which her administration in Edinburgh had to take to do something about the problem, which has increased exponentially over the last decade. The problem is clearly a major one in Scotland but is this going to solve it?

Newsnight produced a graph indicating how the price of alcohol in relation to earnings has dropped substantially in the last twenty years, thus allowing more and cheper drink to be consumed. Meanwhile the excise duty on alcohol in the UK remains one of the highest in Europe. I remember the huge fuss a few years back over 'booze tourists' nipping across the Channel to Calais to buy cheaper French plonk and returning with vans packed with Stella Artois or Chateau Naff. I went to Calais a few years back and noticed that the town's major source of income was alcohol hypermarkets with signs in English everywhere conveniently pointing to 'Cheap Beers and Wines this way'. In fact Calais's whole economy seemed based on this. Now with the currency difference the trade has declined as bargains are not as easy to find as before. Indeed it was rumoured that many unscupulous shoppers were selling their cheap imports in Kent and adjacent counties leading to a further drop in profits for the local pubs.

The graph on Newsnight also illustrated an historical fact, that amounts of alcohol consumed in the UK was very high in 1900 and only began to subside after Lloyd George's World War I government introduced strict licensing hours, which included pubs having to close for an hour or two at lunchtime. This was reputed to be in order to encourage the munitions workers to return to their shell manufacturing bases in a sober condition, so that trenches on the Western Front could continue to be bombarded. Alcohol consumption then declined dramatically until after World War II when it began to climb again. However, it is only in the last twenty years that it has begun to reach the levels last recorded before the First World War. It is not surprising that alcohol consumption was so high in the pre World War I Victorian world, when the denizens of the blighted smoke filled cities of the industrial revolution had only drink to ward off misery and depression. Drink, it was said, was the curse of the working classes. Now it appears to be approaching those levels of consumption again.

This suggests that the advertising filled 'buy now and buy often' and celebrity laden society of the last twenty years has failed on every level. Most concentration is on the economic and fiscal failure but Thatcherism and its successor Blairism has also failed on a deeper and more fundamental level. The glue that held society together was dissolved in a culture of greed and sleaze and personal ambition in a world where Thatcher said that society no longer existed, only the family and the individual. The replacement of the corner pub where people could converse quietly by the large gastropub where the background music is turned up deliberately to increase consumption and where screens everywhere discourage any personal engagement, creates the sort of alcoholic excess we are now witnessing. The idea a few years ago that liberalising the licensing hours would introduce a continental drinking culture was always a pipe dream. In the meantime supermarkets offering cheap booze lead to an average of six pubs per week closing down. We should be encouraging the small local pubs which produce real beers and locally sourced food and which often act as a social fulcrum for their communities. The alternative is the smashed bus shelters and violence ridden streets overseen by CCTV cameras which have become the reality of many town centres.

Increasing the cost of alcohol is not going to solve the problem. Addressing the issues behind that overconsumption and the way alcohol is marketed and sold will. It is time for a campaign to save small scale pubs and a real drink policy, along the lines of the real food one. But it also time that the medical community addressed the issue of how much of all this alcohol problem is really a mental health issue and addressed the real underlying problems. The Victorians addressed the problem with a religious Temperance movement, some of whose monuments are still visible today. We need to find a new remedy for the problem and more CCTVs it is not.