Why nanny state nagging about booze leaves a sour taste (and might even drive us to drink!)

BACK in the days before minimum pricing, I would wander the aisles of wine, always hopeful of finding that perfect bottle of red. You know the one – the one the shop didn’t realise was an absolute gem, so had been priced at less than £5.

A few weeks before the price change, I found that wine. Not the best in the world but, at £2.99 a bottle and eminently drinkable, I had to buy three cases. Then the change came and my tightwad approach to wine-buying was ruined.

The price rise was meant to save us from ourselves and, I thought, it might have an impact. It still might.

But are you drinking less? In theory, minimum pricing means you should be. But if you are, it appears you’re in the minority because statistics show Scots drank more in the first three months of this latest prohibitionist initiative.

I for one spat my dummy out when it happened. I can remember being shocked by the prices. I started buying less, or at least I thought I had but, looking back, I would probably have to conclude that, like most Scots, my drinking hasn’t changed.

It turns out that despite the price rise we collectively spent £35 million more on drink this summer than last. This is partly because alcohol is more expensive. But regardless of the price, we drank 1.8million litres more booze in May, June and July than we did in the same period last year. One can only imagine the scenes at Health Awareness HQ.

HOWEVER, it’s not that nothing has changed. Cider, it seems, has taken a hit. But cider drinkers seem to have switched to better stuff; in particular, sparkling wine sales have shot up. So the Scottish Government appears to have failed to stop us drinking but it may have improved the drink we consume. After all, why buy rubbish cider when it costs the same as something that was previously a lot dearer?

The reason we have drunk more may well be to do with the summer weather and with major events, particularly the World Cup. But I think it may also be due to the unworldly and patronising nature of the anti-drink lobby.

For most people, I suspect, there is suspicion about the advice we receive about drink. The number of units we are, or more particularly, are not supposed to drink doesn’t make sense.

The messages about the ‘number of lives’ drinking less will save feel like distant statistics or something out of a Government-sponsored Grimms’ fairy tale book for adults.

Billions will be saved on emergency and criminal services, we are told. But like you, I think: ‘Well, what’s that got to do with me and my three cases of red?’ On top of all this, the banning of happy hours, bulk discounts and other initiatives of this kind just seem silly.

One of the reasons they seem silly is because they are. Research on alcohol consumption is often contradictory and when genuine research is carried out about this research, little of it stands up to scrutiny.

Even the methods governments here and abroad use to limit our intake, such as restrictions or bans on advertising or warning labels about pregnancy, and violence caused by alcohol, appear to have little effect on us. There will no doubt be more initiatives to tackle our ‘toxic drinking culture’, and there is increasing talk about the need to ‘denormalise alcohol’.

Some want smoking-type labels stuck on bottles warning about heart disease and so on. Others suggest a separate checkout for booze buyers (the naughty queue) and another for teetotallers.

I suspect none of this will work, and a key reason is because behind the hard stats lies a strong whiff of zealotry and a sense it’s just another regulation they want to force upon us. You find taxi drivers and punters talking about these regulations as ‘political correctness’.

This was a term used when talking about linguistic regulations but it has expanded to include annoying health and safety issues and other behaviour management that have become the norm.

And this is the point. Whereas past campaigners, like those in the 19th Century, often stemmed from communities affected by excessive alcohol consumption and were grounded in people’s concerns, today’s prohibitionists appear alien, abstract and disconnected from how things work and how we live and how we drink.

Today’s war on alcohol comes almost entirely from the elites, from government, state officials and sections of the professional classes. Even the alcohol reduction charities are largely state-funded.

Health promoters talk about ‘the evidence’ and tell us that ‘the science says’, while appearing to be moralising and sneering. Old-school temperance promoters, on the other hand, were directly concerned about and relating to the effects that excessive alcohol was having on individuals and families: experiences the people they were talking to knew all about.

Most of all, as civil liberties campaigner Josie Appleton has noted, while old temperance movements were about people’s self-control over their minds and bodies, modern-day temperance is almost entirely about the state’s control over our behaviour.

It is this behaviourist, lab-rat approach that explains why the Government fails to reach those parts other campaigners could sometimes reach.

IT is the infantilising quality of people shouting at us, banning things, prodding us with price hikes and trying to scare us while launching endless initiatives and awareness campaigns that have little or nothing to do with how we live, love, have fun and use and occasionally abuse alcohol.

Booze is, in my experience, largely a good thing and sometimes a great thing. But so too is selfcontrol. Ironically, the more the Government tries to tell us how to behave, the more it risks creating a culture where self-control becomes a thing of the past.

So for any health zealots reading this, think about the rise in alcohol consumption as the glass being half-full, because it means people are still thinking for themselves, which suggests the vast majority of them will be responsible even while they are enjoying a drink.