I’ve been predicting for ages now that booze will replace tobacco as Public Health Enemy Number One – the drinks industry needs to ready itself for a sustained assault in the decade to come. The latest salvo came yesterday, with a call from the British Medical Association for a complete ban on all advertising and marketing of alcohol. The doctors are claiming that alcohol-related damage is especially prevalent among the binge-drinking young and that young people are being ‘thoroughly groomed into a behaviour which is extremely damaging to their health’. (Note the choice of verb which equates booze with predatory paedophiles.) 

As you or I sit down of an evening for a quiet glass or two of Fleurie once the kids have gone to bed, we may feel this assault on our freedom to enjoy a drink is unacceptable. We all know the doctors are unlikely to be satisfied with a ban on marketing, if they were to achieve it. The Doctor State would be even more draconian than the Nanny one. Their ultimate goal is probably prohibition, which would make life a lot less fun.

The problem is the undeniable force of the BMA’s stats: that alcohol-related damage costs employers in England up to £7.3bn, crime and disorder another £7.3bn and healthcare up to £2.8bn. Aside from the costs to the taxpayer of clearing up the mess and paying for liver-transplants, I’d say there’s also a growing revulsion about the anti-social effects of alcohol. The New Age of Austerity may well give them some political traction.

Northern European drinkers just cannot get the idea out of their heads that when beginning an evening with a couple of units, the endpoint of the process has to be to get legless via 23 units more. And it’s not just those teetotallers who have been unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of alcohol-related nastiness that are fed up with the effects of booze madness on everyone else.

I thought that Mayor Boris’s idea, for example, to ban boozing on the tube was a good one. Travelling on the underground is a vile enough experience without some moron wrestling with his demons and spraying his Red Stripe all over you. And as much as I sympathise with the alcoholic derelicts in the local park who piss everywhere and scare the kids, I wouldn’t mind seeing them be forced to consume their Tennants Super somewhere else. I was naïve enough to walk into the convenience store that serves them once and politely suggest that at the end of the day they go round the park benches clearing up the discarded cans. They looked at me as if I’d just urinated all over their floor.

So a few new ideas from the drinks industry, with its £800m a year marketing budget, would not go amiss. They badly need to go beyond paying their annual sub to the Portman Group and trotting out the old chestnut that advertising only shifts brand loyalty. Because if they don’t show willing, they are going to regret it. The doctor’s tourniquet is tightening.

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Editor's blog: Putting the squeeze on the booze industry
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