Alcohol advertising needs severe regulation.
The advice of the 17th-century poet George Herbert was to "drink not the third glass which thou canst not tame". Those who now ignore this injunction include not only heavily tattooed young men but also the suburban middle classes guzzling wine with their evening meals.
Ministers are minded to act. Expect rises in alcohol duties in the Budget and relaxation of competition laws to allow supermarkets to conspire more efficiently against the public by raising the prices of products associated with youthful binge drinking. The government has already promised tougher action against selling alcohol to the under-18s and increased fines for drinking antisocially on the pavement.
But should ministers reverse the switch, now three years old, to 24-hour drinking? Has the relaxation of the licensing laws led, as some papers would have you believe, to our city centres becoming vomit-strewn battlefields where no respectable citizen will tread? An official review suggests not. According to Home Office research (The Impact of the Licensing Act 2003 on Levels of Crime and Disorder by Mike Hough et al), violent crime is if anything slightly down, along with national alcohol consumption per person. Even public perceptions of whether it's safe to go out at night haven't changed much. In any case, references to "24-hour drinking" are misleading. Fewer than 500 pubs and clubs have been granted 24-hour licences and they are mostly used for special occasions; the average closing time for on-licensed premises has extended by only 21 minutes. The government did not enforce longer opening hours; it merely allowed local discretion to replace regulations dictated centrally.
The big question is whether governments should even try to influence our drinking habits. I am old enough to remember when we drinkers would hammer on pub doors in the late afternoon to remind them it was time to reopen and would bicker with restaurateurs over whether we were eating sufficient food to justify a glass of wine. The sale and consumption of alcohol were then restricted by time, place and circumstances. Mild inebriation was tolerated - even for car drivers - but outright drunkenness frowned upon. A man was praised because "he can hold his drink". Women who drank more than an occasional port and lemon were thought unfeminine.
No doubt those social norms were strengthened by government regulation. But they were breaking down long before Labour liberalised the law. Higher incomes, more foreign travel and the changing status of women combined to alter British attitudes. There is some evidence that, far from discouraging binge drinking, the constant media and political barrage on the subject made it seem normal. Similarly, publicity for surveys suggesting the averagely prosperous middle-class home downs several bottles of wine a week, and thus flirts with alcoholism and liver failure, may have the opposite effect to that intended: people may conclude that routine wine drinking is the mark of a sophisticated and upwardly mobile lifestyle.
Libertarians argue that governments have no business trying to interfere with, or even influence, social behaviour. The trouble is that people are not free agents. They are heavily influenced by advertising and fashion. The drinks industry wants to expand its market and therefore looks for new ways of selling to women (beginning with Babycham, invented in 1953), to the young (alcopops), and to middle-class folk at home (wine clubs, some sponsored by banks). Retailers want to maximise sales per square foot of premises: hence the rise of "vertical drinking" in pubs with very few seats (customers drink more if they are standing up) and loud music (people drink more if they can't hear themselves talk).
Road behaviour offers an illuminating parallel. A complete ban on drink driving and the enforcement of speed limits both enjoy, according to polls, more than 80 per cent public support. So why do people still boast about exceeding speed limits - while drink driving, far more than 30 years ago, has become shameful? The answer is that the motor industry bases much of its marketing on the joys of high-performance cars. Moreover, the whole paraphernalia of regulating those who exceed the limits, with its fixed penalties and points on licences, tends to normalise the supposedly undesirable behaviour.
My instincts are to be as libertarian as possible on private behaviour but to be dirigiste on commercial behaviour. Governments could surely regulate the advertising of cars, alcohol, junk food and other potentially dangerous products as severely as they now regulate tobacco advertising. If ministers were more willing to take on big business, they would have less need to nag and regulate the rest of us.
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