The first thing that Britain – like any alcoholic – needs to do is face up to the problem and avoid denial
Modern Britain has a drink problem. We drink too much alcohol. We have too many alcohol-related health problems; and we suffer too much alcohol-related crime. Some 70% of adults drink every week, which may not seem too distressing if it is in moderation, but a quarter of us claim to have been binge drinking at least one day in the past week. Alcohol-related deaths have increased by around 20% since 2001, a shocking trend. Two-thirds of the public believe that the amount people drink in this country is out of control. Two out of three of us claim to have witnessed some kind of alcohol-related crime during the past 12 months. One in 10 – and a quarter of those in the 18-24 age bracket – say they have taken part in it. Only last week pollsters YouGov reported that 40% of Britons identified this country with the word "drunk". But this is not a new association. As long ago as the eighth century, St Boniface wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury to complain that: "In your dioceses the vice of drunkenness is too frequent."
So the first thing that Britain – like any alcoholic – needs to do is face up to the problem and avoid denial. But we also need to face up to the real facts about the problem and not to fall for too many of the myths that can feed wider denial. We also need to take effective actions which actually address the real problem, and not get sidetracked into relatively ineffective actions which address it only at the margins. That is the danger which bedevils the government's attempt to "turn the tide" against binge drinking by imposing minimum unit pricing on alcoholic drinks, announced by the home secretary Theresa May on Friday.
It does not help the public to take this government initiative as seriously as it should when it is so clear that Mrs May's statement to MPs was a political rush job. Parliament does not normally debate major policies on a Friday. In the past decade, as Labour pointed out, there have been only three precedents – the Iraq war, Libya and swine flu. All three were emergencies. But Britain's drinking problem, not least in view of St Boniface's comments 13 centuries ago, can hardly be described as that. The only emergency on Friday was the government's alarm about the so-called "granny tax" continuing to dominate the post-budget headlines through this weekend. That's why ministers turned to drink to drown their sorrows.
Even putting all that to one side, Mrs May's announcement falls some way short of a coherent answer to Britain's alcohol problems. That's largely because it exaggerates the centrality of a binge drinking culture which, while unquestionably important and in need of action, is actually in relative decline, especially among young men. There is also a good case for saying that binge drinking is a relatively less dangerous phenomenon in health terms than other forms of mainly domestic alcohol abuse. Young people actually drink less frequently than older people. And minimum pricing may not be the best way to tackle the undoubted curse of public drunkenness. The well-off managerial and professional classes drink more often and more intensively than those in routine and manual jobs, or than the unemployed. Hitting the poor drinker is part of the answer. But hitting the rich drinker matters as much. And that means nudging as well as nannying the public.
Minimum pricing may well be one way of dealing with part of Britain's drinking problem. But it is doubtful whether it really addresses the problem of juvenile drinking (also in decline), public drunkenness or middle-class drinking, much of which takes place in the home. That's partly because the minimum price per unit is likely to be set too low to have much impact, and partly because it is not matched by a meaningful strategy to deal with the culture of alcohol and health. No one wants to make the best the enemy of the good, but Mrs May's announcement is simply not good enough.