A certain amount of amnesia is required if you are to believe everything the ‘public health’ lobby tells you. Alcohol is frequently in the media but the only story relating to drink that is genuinely newsworthy is the steep decline in drinking that has occurred in the last decade. Britain has been witnessing its biggest fall in alcohol consumption since the 1930s. This trend was ignored for a long time, but once it became clear that it was not a statistical blip the truth began to seep out.
The BBC, which has never seen an anti-alcohol press release it doesn’t like, asked in 2011: ‘Why is alcohol consumption falling?’ After years of fretting about ‘24 hour drinking’ and ‘pocket-money prices’, it admitted that ‘behind these stories is an unexpected truth – Britons have been drinking less and less every year since 2002’.
A few months later, it owned up to another unexpected truth when it announced that fewer teenagers were drinking.
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