Alcohol

James Chapman reports today that plans for a minimum unit price for alcohol are set to be dropped. This is welcome news. The policy always promised to simply drive up the price of drink, penalising all drinkers, while doing little about public drunkenness or binge drinking. The Mail says that the plan has fallen out of favour because of the government’s new emphasis on the cost of living. It is dawning on everyone that that hugely increasing the price of people’s pleasures at a time of falling real incomes is not a sensible political move. Although, the question remains of whether David Cameron will be prepared to fully abandon a

Given the decidedly mixed record of minimum alcohol pricing around the world, why is the government so sure it will work in Britain? The figures it quotes are certainly striking: a 50p unit price will reduce annual alcohol-related mortality by 900, 3,393, “more than 1,000” or “nearly 10,000” a year in England alone. But how solid are they? The Adam Smith Institute did some digging, and found that all of these predictions can be traced back to a computer model designed by a team at Sheffield University. The model has numerous flaws, many of a technical nature, and like all models it is only as good as the data and

Pete posted earlier on the Prime Minister’s latest intervention on the issue of problem drinking. The new proposals — like a greater police presence in A&Es, and ‘drunk tanks’, special units where drunks are taken to sober up — are sensible enough, but seem small relative to the scale of the supposed problem, and focus on peripheral (though important) side-effects, rather than the core of the issue. The ‘big idea’ seems to be missing, even though the Conservatives have been flirting with it for some years, is a minimum unit price (MUP) for alcohol: far more controversial, but potentially far more effective. The last Labour government, in which I was an adviser, looked at this

The Telegraph reports today that the Prime Minister has asked for work to be done across Whitehall on how a minimum price for alcohol could be set. As the paper’s leader column makes clear, this will not be a politically easy thing to do. When I interviewed the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley for the Christmas issue of The Spectator a few weeks back, he was clear about why he didn’t like the concept of a minimum price: ‘I don’t like a minimum price, we are acting against below cost selling. My problem with a minimum price, well I have two problems. One is it’s regressive, so there are perfectly normal

No prizes for guessing who wrote this, or what the drink is: ‘There was very little left of it [in his hipflask] and one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in the cafés, of all the chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of bookshops, and kiosks, and of galleries, and of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of the Butte Chaumont, of Foyet’s old hotel, and of being able to relax and read in the evening, of all the old things he had enjoyed and

Rum is a relatively young drink – 15th century – and still under-appreciated, but at its best can match any whisky or brandy for complexity and sophistication. Peter Grogan enters the darkness A long time ago a knuckle-dragging ancestor of mine left a gourd-ful of palm sugar out in the rain. Trolling along, the right little speck of yeast eventually came to rest in it, causing the sugar to spontaneously ferment. The result probably didn’t taste too good but it had something that helped the day pass in a pleasant blur. Fast-forward 10,000 years — at a guess — and that same something can apparently be had from mixing some

Mary Ann Sieghart has a great piece in the Independent today about how, inadvertently, we have designed a system that almost encourages young people to drink irresponsibly. As she argues, a lot of problems have come, oddly, from making it harder for people to drink under age in pubs.  As Sieghart puts it, ‘And because we were under 18, we knew we had to remain inconspicuous. The landlord would tolerate our presence as long as we didn’t embarrass ourselves or him. We didn’t dare get smashed or he wouldn’t allow us back. And because we tended to meet the same group of friends in the same pub, being banned was

Theresa May has taken the truncheon to the previous government’s rather singular anti-social behaviour policy. The ASBO, of which more than half were ignored in 2008, will be a thing of the past; supermarkets will not be able to sell alcohol at less than cost price; and 24 four hour drinking licenses will be subject to local vetoes, even if the residents do not live near or adjacent to pubs and clubs. On confronting anti-social behaviour, May pledges that ultimate political cliché – a coherent and comprehensive strategy. At the moment, there are few details beyond fines for selling drink to underage drinkers. Limiting booze intake is welcome, but alcohol

Happy New Year – and have a drink! That’s the message from the new year issue of The Spectator, where Leah McLaren has written a superb piece answering the Liam Donaldsons of this world. Here she is, in full flow: “Almost all of this country’s most famous names been unapologetic boozers. From Kate Moss to Francis Bacon to Christopher Hitchens to the Queen Mum, Brits have a great tradition of not letting their functional alcoholism drag them down. Without it, arguably, we would not have punk rock, romantic poetry or basic democratic freedoms — for as Churchill urged us to remember, he ‘took more out of alcohol’ than alcohol took

One line from the Sunday papers is still haunting me today. In the Mail on Sunday, Phillip Blond wrote that, “one million children have alcohol-addicted parents”. Think about that for a minute. What hope can these children have growing up in these kind of households? How can we as a society ensure that these children have a decent chance in life despite such a challenging start? There are no easy answers to these questions. Considering the state’s appalling record with children in care, taking these children away from their parents is not the answer. But then what is? It seems that the only answer is to deal with the problem