The Great Binge-drinking Crisis...

From The Sun to The  Economist, the media has been hyping the binge drinking ‘crisis’.

 

Really?

 

A crisis is the point reached at which you either die or recover. Is that where we have got to, or is it that every difficult issue  today is a ‘crisis’?

 

Let’s get a dose of realism into this.

 

There are two alleged problems – binge drinking by yoof and booze-related health problems amongst the elderly.

 

Drinking by the 15 to 25 age-group has declined markedly in the last few years, by around 30%. The media loves to lurk outside Saturday night watering holes to catch some teen-age slapper lying drunk in a pool of her own vomit, but might I suggest that this is atypical. It is surely not endemic.

 

As to the elderly, it appears to escaped the attention of the preachers that in the last 30 years life expectancy has increased by around 20 years. This means that the average oldie liver has had 2 extra decades of the hard stuff.

 

But accepting that here might just be a problem, what to do?

 

Dave’s characteristically daft idea is minimum pricing. This is just throwing dust in our eyes because he knows that the EU would clobber it. The drinks industry would be delighted if he actually managed to get this through.

 

A starting point might be to adjust the tax ratio between spirits and other alcohol.

 

50 years ago, the national tipple was beer. Spirits were a luxury. The controlled price for a bottle of scotch was about half-a week’s wages for a manual worker.

 

I am not suggesting a return to that kind of price discrimination, but the tax on beer should be slashed (which might also encourage people back into pubs; the traditional night down the local is now just too expensive). The tax on spirits should be raised sufficiently to create a significant price differential and hopefully reduce sales of vodka-based fizzy drinks that are almost exclusively pitched at the young market.

 

This would also benefit the Revenue in these straitened times.

 

The solution to disorderly binge-drinking is simple: enforce the law.

 

It is an offence for a barman to serve a person who is drunk. The licensing authority should be ruthless in barring offending licensees, together with the owners of the business to prevent them simply replacing one manager with another. In short, recidivists should be put out of business, even (or especially) the greedy chains like Pubmaster.

 

It is an offence to be drunk and disorderly or drunk and incapable, but the police do little. I guess they don’t want to clean-up the cells the following morning. In the old days it was a night in the cells, an appearance before the Beak the next morning, 40 shillings fine, and your name in the local rag.

 

Then there’s the liquor licensing laws.

 

The permitted hours are crazy. What possible public good is served by 24 hours licenses? 12 hours a day should be the maximum with 11p.m. as latest closing time.

 

Supermarkets should have to pay a license fee commensurate with their ability to pay. This might discourage them from selling booze cheaper than bottled water.

 

And finally………

 

My belief is that the 1980’s saw the apogee of hard drinking. In those days champagne  at opening time was the real deal during the Big Bang days in the City, and much business was transacted over 3-hour lunches at Simpsons, as I vaguely recall, now replaced by burger-lite and cocaine. Fleet St was fuelled by booze, and the quality of journalism has suffered since it went out of fashion. The Kings & Keys in Fleet St was the real HQ of the DT, and the Printer’s Devil was the haunt of the last of the hot-metal men.

 

Crisis? What crisis?