The inevitable and renewed attack on drinking - the temperance campaign rejuvenated by new booze guideline

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It was inevitable. As certain as anything could be. As soon as the ink was dry on the Chief Medical Officer's shocking new guidelines on safe drinking there would some research outlining the terrible dark truth about all our boozy habits. A report based entirely on us exceeding those new guidelines - 14 units a week, less than a pint a day. A report based on guidelines that reject the evidence about alcohol and health, that could have been written by some po-faced nineteenth century temperance campaigner.

Us blokes are heading for oblivion and an early grave. We're in denial:

Experts are calling for health warnings on all alcoholic drinks after data showed millions of middle-aged men drink above government guidelines and do not believe it does them any harm.

You know something, we (and I'm definitely one of these denying middle-aged men) don't give a toss about your guidelines. We think they are stupid nannying nonsense. If we look a little further into the truth of those guidelines, what we find is that they are a complete load of unevidenced twaddle produced by the anti-booze lobby. But most blokes don't get this far, they look at what they drink and decide that, you know, it's fine and it isn't going to make any noticeable difference to their life.

If we were to start living the life the nannying fussbuckets, New Puritans, health fascists, prohibitionists and public health campaigners would have us live, we'd be giving up a whole load of entirely innocent pleasure. To absolutely no benefit whatsoever. None. Zilch. There is absolutely no scientific basis for the new guidelines so we can - and should - go on drinking the same way as we did before the nannies announced we were all headed for an early, alcoholic grave for enjoying a pint of two most days.

What makes me most cross is that the government repeats this lie - and it is a lie, a complete fiction, a load of utter bollocks, misleading, without any scientific basis, incorrect, misleading, fictional:

“Drinking any level of alcohol regularly carries a health risk for anyone, but if men and women limit their intake to no more than 14 units a week it keeps the risk of illness like cancer and liver disease low."

This is why we should sack the entirety of Public Health England, the Chief Medical Officer and most of the egregious profession of public health. The reason Jeremy Hunt should go as secretary of state isn't because of the doctors' strike but because he has allowed these lies, this crass fiction to be endorsed by government.

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An everyday story of booze and bingo

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So we had a budget. We get one every year to great fanfare accompanied by every single pundit on everything issuing their 'budget review' or similar. No one sane human being can begin to comprehend the scale of gobbledegook production that is responding to the budget mere moments after the Chancellor of the Exchequer sits down.

Many years ago, in the days when I had a proper job in the private sector, we used to prop the office telly up in the board room, drag a few clients in and watch the budget. As the thing closed, we'd realise that the detail we needed wasn't in the great man's actual speech (there was always something somewhere in the darker recesses of the budget documentation about tax free limits on friendly society bonds or some bizarre but important tweak to postal regulations).

Now because this was in the days before the wild west of the web arrived, the next event was the arrival of a thick, badly printed and poorly proof-read analysis from either a bank or a big accountancy firm. This involved the firm's experts (I know they were experts because they told me so) restating what the Chancellor said only using longer words and maybe some graphs - or "charts" as they call them. All this being accompanied by urging us to take advantage of the expensive services of the bank, accountancy firm or consultancy.

Meanwhile the world returned to normal. The newspapers ran their headlines, crafting them to meet the expected tone of the rag in question all filtered through the tribal preferences of whoever was running the show at that time. The rest of us headed out to stock up on cigars, whisky and petrol ahead of the imminent deadline when, 'ping', all the prices would go up.

Budgets matter because people notice them. For once the apathetic Brit sits up and takes notice. Perhaps even talks to another person about how this political event impacts on their lives. More importantly, some time soon, the budget decision will really affect them - a few more pounds of take home pay, perhaps a more expensive shopping basket at the supermarket or maybe a little more saving and a little less taxing.

But understand this, it's not the headlines that are driving all this but the actual changes made in the budget. Cutting the duty on beer by a couple of pennies might not make any difference to what we pay but it might mean that your local doesn't close. And the same goes for bingo - for sure, it'll be a little cheaper for the punter but the real win is that the bingo halls stay open, carry on providing entertainment (and jobs) in places where those things are limited.

So when middle-class people who don't go to pubs and wouldn't be seen dead in a bingo hall accuse the chancellor of 'patronising' the working-classes by cutting taxes on beer and bingo, they miss the point entirely. And even worse when they dredge through 1984 to find the quote about beer and gambling as social control they just show contempt for people whose lives don't revolve around making grand (but still witty, ever so witty) statements about politics while paying £8 for a small bottle of achingly trendy craft beer.

And the irony of accusing the government of 'social control' when cutting those booze and bingo taxes becomes stark when the big deal in the budget - reforming pensions - is discussed. Here's where the real contempt that those good thinking 'progressives' have for ordinary people comes gushing out - "you can't trust people to spend their own money sensibly" explains one especially smug Labour advisor while others tweet that people are bad at making long-term decisions.

If making it a little easier or cheaper to drink or gamble is social control then, compared to forcing people to invest their money in a specific, government-approved manner, it's a peculiarly liberating form of social control. And one I'm quite happy with! I know I'm supposed to nod sagely at the comparing of 'booze and bingo' to 'bread and circuses' (although Juvenal's quote does start with 'now no-one buys our votes any more') but these are examples of the little pleasures that, for most people, are what makes life something other than a drudge.

For the three-and-a-half million or so bingo players and about twenty-five million beer drinkers yesterday's budget will have been cheering - not so cheering as to change much about their lives (although raising the tax threshold will have helped too) but worth a smile and a cynical 'thanks, George'.

The proof will be in the cooking and eating. But so far the budget looks OK for ordinary folk and less good for the arrogant folk who think they know better.

Cheers George!

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The predicable consequences of taxing alcohol...

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Eventually people start dodging those taxes - and the results are dangerous:

Magistrates fined the owners of the BED club in the Grand Arcade (Gatecrasher Clubs and Bars Ltd) £5,000 with £2,095 costs after 656 litres of fake spirit were found on the premises in September last year, according to West Yorkshire Trading Standards Service (WYTSS).

It’s the biggest seizure yet of fake vodka by Trading Standards in West Yorkshire.

This is the consequence of government action - it makes such illegal arbitrage worth the risk. At £2 a shot that's over fifty grand. Or, in terms of tax avoided, it's about six grand.

The more we load onto duty, the more of this we'll see and the more we'll read of people poisoned by:

...isopropanol, tertiary butanol and chloroform, none of which should be in vodka.

Sadly this won't be the lesson from this event - the tip of an illegal spirits iceberg - our lords and masters will carry on piling the tax onto booze in the interests of "health". With the direct result being, at some point, blind, even dead nightclubbers. 

H/T Leeds Citizen for the story
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Nannying fussbucket of the week: Councillor Gordon Castle

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You see the folk running Northumberland have spotted a business opportunity. Thousands of Scots cruising across the border to buy up supermarkets full of cheap booze once their especially stupid and puritanical government has introduced a minimum price for said booze. For the Northumberlanders there's a worry:

"Shops in Berwick, Alnwick and Morpeth with easy access to the A1 should be preparing to accept a huge increase in trade but I expect, without an advertising campaign, Carlisle with its easy motorway access will win this race."

So, to stop this lucrative, economy-enhancing trade going to Cumbria a campaign is proposed. Cllr Castle thinks this irresponsible:

 "We want to promote Alnwick, we want Scottish tourists, but we don't want booze tourists,"

Nor, one guesses does Cllr Castle want the jobs and businesses that come with this lucrative trade (at least until our own daft government falls from its tree and introduces a minimum price itself).

However, Cllr Castle may be something of a fussbucket - only wanting the right sort of tourist - but the Scottish government are complete loons when they say this:

...it is highly unlikely that a minimum price, that will only affect a proportion of alcohol sales, would make it worth their while to travel as it would cost people in terms of fuel and time."

How much beer and cheap vodka can you get into the back of a transit? Let's say 1000 bottles of mid-strength lager at 35p per unit (roughly a quid a bottle) - that's 15p per unit cheaper than in, say, Edinburgh (perhaps 40p per bottle). If I sell out of the back of my van at £1.20, I'm clearing £200 per trip. It's a roughly 160 mile round trip. Looks like I'm in profit.

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Who was it said booze was too cheap?

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Not cheap enough for some, it seems:

Unregulated and potentially dangerous fake alcohol has been found for sale in Bradford, West Yorkshire Trading Standards has warned.

Senior trading standards officer David Lodge said they had seen an increase in the availability of bogus booze over the last 12 months – with some bottles containing traces of chemicals suggesting the alcohol has been through an industrial process.

You see the duty is high enough to make it worthwhile to risk criminal charges for dodging that duty - making and importing booze now falls into the same category as drug smuggling.

And, for this we have to thank the New Puritan, anti-alcohol idiots. When someone dies because of this bad booze, the blood will be on the hands of Alcohol Concern, the British Medical Association and others campaigning for booze to be more expensive.

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Save us from the nannying fussbuckets...

The Prime Minister - tempted here to call him "nannying-fussbucket-in-chief" - has visited a hospital somewhere in the North East where he's chosen to share his wisdom with us on the matter of alcohol. We're told:

...the last decade has seen a "frightening growth" in the number of people who think it is "acceptable for people to get drunk in public in ways that wreck lives, spread fear and increase crime", many of them under the legal drinking age.

A frightening growth, Mr Cameron? Show us where it's hiding for the truth is that consumption of alcohol, alcohol-related crime or anti-social behaviour and the incidence of binge-drinking have fallen over the past ten years. Yes, folks - fallen.  And the biggest fall in consumption has been among 18-24 year-old men.

So why do the nannying fussbuckets keeping on with this "growing problem" nonsense?

The objective of course is prohibition - the "denormalisation" of drinking. This is, for the Church of Public Health, a moral crusade, the abolition of a normal pleasure for millions of people simply because these people - these nannying fussbuckets - disapprove of it.

Injury from sports and physical exercise costs the NHS more than drinking does - the hospitals are filled with people suffering from breaks and sprains, bashes and bruises. Yet no-one is calling for rugby or horse-riding to be banned or for a gym tax.

These people simply disapprove of people drinking - especially young working class men.

So I have a suggestion for Mr Cameron - next time you want to make announcements about boozing make them in a busy pub in front of real live drinkers. See how they respond!

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A lesson from Sid...

Last weekend, I was told about Sid. I wasn't introduced as Sid wasn't there, he'd stayed back in Saudi Arabia.

Code Arabic name for black-market alcohol distilled from fermented sugar water. Often fermented in stills made from used propane cylinders according to specifications given on the "Blue Flame" - the authoritative document on alcohol manufacture from Saudi Arabia. Life-blood of expats in Saudi Arabia. Normally distilled to 90%+ alcohol content and bottled in used water bottles to avoid detection. Colorless, relatively tasteless, good with tonic and lime. Also means "friend" in Arabic. Also shortened to "Sid".

There, in a country where alcohol is completely banned, it is made in the kitchen. Almost everywhere. Despite the prospect of punishment:

Sentences for alcohol offences range from a few weeks or months imprisonment for consumption to several years for smuggling, manufacturing or distributing alcohol.  Lashes can also be part of the sentence; and a hefty Customs fine if smuggled alcohol is involved.  The authorities also hand out stiff penalties to people found in possession of equipment for making alcohol.

And the lesson from our friend Sid? Banning booze, making booze too expensive, limiting where it can be bought, indeed "denormalising" drink will result in smuggling and illegal production. And - as Sid shows us - making booze is really easy (apparently soaking Jack Daniels barbecue chips in the sugar water is good for flavour!).  And would we rather have good quality drink produced in a clean environment or moonshine made from heaven knows what and making us blind?

Dale bought a bottle of Drop Vodka from an off-licence in Bradford, West Yorkshire. He said: “I’d never heard of the brand before but it was £4 cheaper than the others. The rest of my family are all beer and lager drinkers so I was the only one drinking it.”

After downing a quarter of the bottle, Dale began to feel more drunk than usual and his vision began to blur. But by the next morning he could not see at all and was suffering excruciating pains in the lower half of his body.

“As soon as I woke I knew there was something wrong,” he said. "I was in agony and my sight was almost completely gone.”

 Or blowing up the neighbourhood:

Five men died and one was seriously injured after a huge explosion at an industrial estate last night. The blast ripped through what locals claim was an illegal vodka distillery and was heard from up to five miles away.

The tighter our controls get on drink and drinking the more it will go underground. And the more it will be controlled by the same sort of vicious criminals who supply illegal drugs and, in doing so, terrorise neighbourhoods.

The lesson from Sid is that the Church of Public Health will lose the war on booze just as surely as we are losing the war on drugs and, if we're honest about it, the long war on fags. But they will, in conducting that war, in denormalising drink, hand a currently licensed, regulated business over to criminal gangs.

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Nudge, nudge, wink, wink - behavioural economics as a tool of social control

The matter of behavioural economics came to the front of my mind with reading this excellent blog post – in a roundabout way a review of “Nudge. Now the term “behavioural economics” has always seemed to me an oddly oxymoronic description since, if it is concerned with anything, economics is concerned with individual behaviour.

So let’s start at the beginning:

“The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security is so powerful a principle that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations; though the effect of these obstructions is always more or less either to encroach upon its freedom, or to diminish its security.” (‘Smith, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Wealth of Nations)

The core premise on which all economics is based rests on the view that – taken in the round – each individual seeks “to better his condition”. And this has been taken to mean that decisions taken by individuals are ‘rational’ – hence the idea of ‘economic man’. Yet Smith – nor the other classical economists – never said that every decision taken by an individual is rational given full information and knowledge. We need to consider that, in aggregate, the decisions of individuals tend to be rational (i.e. directed to the betterment of that individual’s condition) or have a rational intent.

Now, since classical economic models allow for the effect of decision-making in circumstances where an individual has incomplete information, we would be disposing of the child as well as the dirty water simply to dismiss classical models (or for that matter neo-classical models) because of bounded rationality, incomplete self-control and (alleged) lack of self-interest. What we need to appreciate is that our issue relates less to information than to perceptions of incentive. Hence ‘nudge’.

Which brings us to advertising – after all the persistence and success of advertising is living proof of the bounded nature of human decision-making. Advertising does not limit itself to putting across information about the product, where you can buy it and its price. The marketer seeks to appeal to heuristics, to create short-cuts and to reduce the decision-making process to a sub-pavlovian reflex when presented with a brand message.

All this is true but for one sneaking little problem – the advertiser has to live up to his brand promise. It really is that simple – businesses that do not do what they say in their advertising (and I’m talking about brand here not deliberate mis-selling) do not develop good brands. McDonalds presents an image of good fun, tasty food and good value – all things to which people aspire and the availability of which they consider betterment. And (for many people) the company lives up to its brand promise. A promise that does not extend to nutritional value, not being fat or even saving the planet.

We (says he trying to put himself into the mind of the health nudgers) want to believe that the McDonalds consumer is some kind of victim. And here the behavioural economists step away from the snug amoral world of economics and into moral judgment:

“Incomplete self-control refers to the tendency of economic agents to make decisions that are in conflict with their long-term interest. Self-control problems may lead to addictive behaviour, undersaving or procrastination. As opposed to the neo-classical view, restricting the choice set can be beneficial for an agent with bounded willpower.”(from Diamond & Vartianen, ‘Behavioural Economics & its applications’)

It is too short a step from noticing that some folk make stupid decisions to intervening to direct their decision-making in some way (i.e. altering the ‘choice architecture’). This is a moral judgement since in the aggregate (as ever ceteris paribus) the typical human decision is rational – it responds to incentives and is directed to betterment. It is as daft to run a model based on a pre-judged moral position as it is to say that every human makes a rational decision every time.

The problem – as our behavioural economists have found – is that those pesky humans just won’t co-operate. They carry on drinking, smoking, scoffing fatty, salt-laden goodies and indulging in a whole panoply of high risk activities. And the only response is – as we have seen, for example, with smoking and begin to seen with booze and food – ever more insistent ‘nudges’. And some of these nudges aren’t even that they’re outright bans, huge financial blunt weapons and armies of enforcers of the behaviouralists’ moral assumptions.

All economics is about behaviour but the economics that says behaviour can or should be controlled or directed is immoral, inconsistent, judgemental and wrong. We may wish to understand human behaviour better – that is a proper course of human enquiry. But only if this is done for reasons of understanding – sadly the behavioural economics we see too often is designed solely with the intention of control. We have returned to an age before the enlightenment that Locke, Hume, Smith and other brought. Back to the brutal, controlling leviathan and the moral control of the puritan.

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Anyone know how to make moonshine? Thoughts on the economics of minimum booze prices.

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Today the Prime Minister came out in support of a proposal to introduce a 50p per unit minimum price for alcohol within Greater Manchester. Now, leaving aside the absence of any border control in this conurbation and the obvious fact that driving from Bolton to a supermarket in Bacup isn’t exactly a great trip, we should maybe consider the economic impact of minimum pricing.

The core argument – and we have to start somewhere – is that a relatively low minimum price will only impact off-sales since pub and restaurant sales are typically over £1 per unit. Here’s one study’s conclusions:

Only alcohol sold for home consumption would see an increase in prices, and reduction in sales would generally spare pubs and restaurants. While consuming more units of alcohol than other groups, higher income and high managerial groups would be less affected by this pricing policy.

However, this isn’t the view held everywhere. The Centre for Economics and Business Research (in a study funded by a brewer) criticised the theoretical basis for the argument and the evidence. Most importantly, while the evidence shows (not surprisingly) a relationship between price and consumption this is weakest for the heaviest drinkers.

However, when overall alcohol consumption levels and prices are taken into account, heavier drinkers are less responsive to price changes than moderate drinkers. The University of Sheffield study estimates that hazardous and harmful drinkers have a
price elasticity of -0.21 across all alcohol products – this implies that a 10 per cent increase in price would only lead to a 2.1 per cent reduction in consumption amongst heavier drinkers.

However, we still see a “positive” impact from minimum pricing albeit a small one. However, this is a pretty blunt implement that, in effect, targets the poor (note the findings from the first study cited). More importantly, minimum pricing has an impact on supply – there is an incentive for the producers of alcohol sold currently at below 50p per unit to increase their supply so as to take advantage of the excess profits implied by the minimum price. With higher profits the producers (and their retail agents) can afford to invest more in promotion.

The most likely outcome of this surplus reducing investment is promotion targeted at drinkers currently buying alcohol at higher prices – either in pubs or for home consumption. The impact of this would be negative for the pub trade and counter to the expectations of those promoting minimum pricing. And we have not yet considered moonshine!

All-in-all it seems unlikely that minimum pricing will address the core issue of the ‘problem drinker’. And we have to set this against falling consumption and fewer alcohol-related emergency admissions. Whatever we’re doing at present, its working and, rather than penalising people for only being able to afford cheap booze, maybe we should focus our efforts on the relatively small number of problem drinkers.

Anyone know how to make moonshine?

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