Beware of ‘passive drinking’
In his report, released on 16 March 2009, Sir Liam Donaldson said the average adult in the UK consumes the equivalent of 120 bottles of wine a year and warned: ‘The country has a drink problem.’
You may not accept Sir Liam’s figures. 120 bottles per capita seems like a lot of wine to us here at BRAUWELT. Still, there is no denying that Britons have a problem when it comes to alcohol. Moderate consumption does not seem to be written into their DNA.
Sir Liam said as passive smoking damages others, passive drinking was inflicting untold damage on children whose mothers drink while pregnant, or whose parents drink too much, as well as the 7,000 victims of drunken drivers and 39,000 alcohol-related sexual assaults per year.
He recommended setting a minimum price per unit of alcohol at GBP 0.50 and tightening licensing laws so local authorities had to consider the deaths and ill-health due to alcohol in the area before granting new licenses for pubs or clubs.
Deep down, Sir Liam, who is no fool, must know that his blueprint for change is a non-starter, politically, but he has brought an important social issue into sharper focus.
Sir Liam himself has compared his call for a minimum tariff on alcohol with his earlier successful advocacy of a ban on smoking in public places. Yet the analogy is flawed and so is the strategy. Even moderate smoking harms both the smoker and those in his or her vicinity, whereas the moderate drinker harms nobody.
Nevertheless, Sir Liam is surely right about one thing: to do nothing and let things develop as they are, is not an option.
Yet, what is to be done? What can the government do? Its options are limited. Should it reduce alcohol consumption by raising prices? Or should it try to limit the opportunities that people have to drink?
It will be remembered that when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, one of the first things he did was to promise a review of the liberal licensing laws introduced by his predecessor – which had been regularly blamed for the rise in binge-drinking.
However, the review, published a year ago, proved inconclusive. While alcohol-induced crime and hospital admissions had increased in some areas, they had fallen in others.
In effect, there was no firm evidence that the abolition of strict licensing hours had opened the floodgates to excess. The excess was there already: a British disease, if you will.
Already, the government has opted to make drinks more expensive. Thanks to measures announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, excise duty on alcohol is already set to rise by 2 percent above the rate of inflation for the next four years. That falls well short of Sir Liam’s demands but strikes a proper balance between the rights of moderate drinkers and the wider responsibilities of the state.
Some other, limited legislative, measures may also be justified. In a leader “The Telegraph” argued that supermarkets that treat alcohol as a loss-leader, selling it at way below cost price, need somehow to be restrained.
‘But a master plan based on taxing all drinkers indiscriminately is doomed to fail. Public opinion would not wear it. Better, surely, to target the individuals most at risk. Educate them. Counsel them. Support them medically. Punish them if they overstep the mark. Even shame them, if necessary. Would quite so many teenagers end up drunk in the gutter if they had to sit through CCTV footage of their antics?’ The Telegraph argued.
Wagging a warning finger, “The Telegraph” said: “The very worst thing to happen would be for the binge-drinking epidemic to become a political football, with everyone rushing to apportion blame and come up with quick fixes. It is not that kind of problem. The genie was not suddenly let out of the bottle when pub opening hours were extended or when the price of lager fell by a few pence. Excess, self-indulgence, call it what you will, was part of the zeitgeist, the dark side of the economic boom. Politicians – although they can provide a sensible framework for responsible drinking, and should strive to do so– cannot cure us of it. We need to do it ourselves, and accept responsibility, as individuals, as families and as communities.’
Well put. The responsibility is foremost ours.
