The threat to working class culture is demonisation, denormalisation, temperance and prohibition not appropriation

Let's start this with the (I'm sure pretty unsurprising) fact that I'm not in the slightest bit 'working class'. It's important we start there because I like pubs, enjoy some of that fatty food, used to smoke and have been in my fair share of working men's clubs, pubs and bars. This isn't showing off but rather an observation about what we might understand by 'working class culture'. We might add greyhound racing, course fishing and pigeon racing to this list plus such delights as bingo, betting shops and seaside amusement arcades. Others might add things about taste in furniture, music, clothing and even styles of gardening.

Some don't seem to get this and, watching what we might call 'social worker chic', get all confused about what is and isn't working class. Just like those trendy middle-class social workers who dressed scruffy because they thought their working class clients would like it, we have a new generation of chippy (and probably middle class) sorts who think bars under railway arches with bare brick walls, uneven tables and unmatched seating are in some way a pastiche of working-class culture:

Visit any bar in the hip districts of Brixton, Dalston or Peckham and you will invariably end up in a warehouse, on the top floor of a car park or under a railway arch. Signage will be minimal and white bobbing faces will be crammed close, a Stockholm syndrome recreation of the twice-daily commute, enjoying their two hours of planned hedonism before the work/sleep cycle grinds back into gear.

Expect gritty, urban aesthetics. Railway sleepers grouped around fire pits, scuffed tables and chairs reclaimed from the last generation’s secondary schools and hastily erected toilets with clattering wooden doors and graffitied mixed sex washrooms. Notice the lack of anything meaningful. Anything with politics or soul.

Now I may be wrong here but the 'authentic' working class wouldn't ever have gone to these sort of places. The pubs and clubs they went to were smartly turned out places with neat upholstery, tidy copper-topped tables and well-polished bars. They had a juke-box, a one-armed bandit and a snug - the customers saw gritty urban aesthetics every day at work and really didn't want exposed girders or plain brickwork on a night out.

For me one difference between the middle and working classes - a practical one but real nonetheless - was shown when I lived in a bedsit in York. One of my fellow residents was a bin-man - every morning he crawled out from bed slung on work overalls and cleared up other people's trash while I (slightly later) headed off to an office all suited and booted. And when I was going out of an evening, I took off that suit to put on something more casual and comfortable. The bloke who emptied bins, on the other hand, bathed, groomed and dressed in the best clothes he owned to go out.

Anyway, to return to our middle-class whinge-bucket who thinks opening a bar with cheap decoration and expensive drinks is appropriating working class culture. The real problem isn't this at all - that some ever-so-hipster folk start food stalls in a traditional London street market helps sustain those places and reminds us they're places for everyone not just one or other class. And there are still plenty of greengrocers selling bowls of veg for a quid - at least in most London markets I've ever visited. The problem is that we disapprove of working class cultural choices.

Take drinks, for example. We're pretty cool about charging £8 for half-a-pint of over-hopped craft beer but when some lads buy a six pack of cheap lager to drink while having a kickabout in the park then it dreadful 'binge drinking' and the middle-classes cry for laws - minimum pricing - that price them out of drinking altogether. Rather like Titus Salt banning boozers in his 'perfect' village while serving fine wines to guests at his mansion, today's middle class fussbucket believes the working classes can't be trusted with drinking especially when that drink is lager, cider or cheap vodka.

Look again at that list of working class pursuits above - those same middle-class worrywarts think greyhound racing is cruel, fishing is barbaric and betting shops are filled with devices that are impossible for punters to resist (working class punters of course, they're too dumb to understand). All the pubs or at least the sort of pubs those working class blokes used to frequent, have gone - you occasionally see an older bloke in one of these trendy over-priced hipster bars looking like a bewildered alien visiting from another better planet. And, as well as those pubs, the smoking ban has decimated the bingo halls and working men's clubs - every community used to have at least one of each but now they're gone or else counting the sad days before brewery loans can't be covered by the handful of customers.

Even something like vaping, which should be a public health bonanza, is sneered at by these middle-class do gooders. Just like the cheap lager, these do gooders see the electronic cigarette as something naff used mostly by fat, unattractive working-class people. And we - the middle class public sector managers, councillors, MPs and MEPs who decide these things using crappy research from our middle class friends with sociology doctorates - know better. The working classes mustn't be allowed to make their own choices - mistaken or otherwise. And if we can't actually ban aspects of working class culture then we'll 'denormalise' it, turn it into something so marginalised that those who indulge can be safely treated as pariahs.

Drinking, smoking, vaping, one-armed bandits, betting shops, burgers, fried chicken, over the top Christmas lights, paved front gardens, outdoor drinking, fizzy drinks, chocolate treats in the kids' lunch boxes, sugar pourers on the cafe table, salt, cheap chicken, bacon sarnies, cream, best butter, standing outside for a fag...there seems to be no end to the disapproval - nearly always of working class things - from the nannying fussbuckets, greeny-greeny nutters and know-all 'experts'.

So no dear writers, it's not appropriation or gentrification that's the problem for working class culture it's bans, controls, taxes and an endless nannying chorus of disapproval. It is demonisation, denormalisation, temperance and prohibition that's the threat to working class culture not a load of well-paid Londoners getting ripped off at some craft bar in a railway arch.

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On the ideology of public health

Building London's sewers - real public health work

I know I rant and rave about them, complaining about their outlook, attitudes and policies. I've called them health fascists, nannying fussbuckets and the Church of Public Health. And I don't regret a word if it.

However, being a kindly sort, I thought I'd have a bash at understanding what we mean by 'public health'. Not just for the entertainment but rather to set out why the approach and strategy - how millions in public funding is spent - might be improved.

We recognise that public health begins with us recognising that there are environmental factors that affect the health of populations. The classic example is John Snow and the Broad Street Pump but there are many other examples where interventions in the environment improved health - clean water, sewage systems, the clean air acts and the whole system of driver training and road safety. We should also note that, while the medical profession was involved in identifying the problem, its solution was largely in the hands of different professions, not least the often criticised environmental health officer.

Within public health budgets these interventions are still important - responding to epidemics and disease outbreaks, vaccination and inoculation and pollution control. But the profession made a significant shift away from public health being about environmental intervention to improve people's lives. Instead of clean air, clean water and inoculation against disease, we got this as a definition:

The science and art of promoting and protecting health and well-being, preventing ill-health and prolonging life through the organised efforts of society.

This comes from the Faculty of Public Health and represents a significant change from the idea of public health being about interventions where either an all-population or environmental justification exists.  We've gone from using science and statistics to understand how cholera can be prevented to using price intervention to try and alter the behaviour of alcoholic. And the starting point for this shift was smoking - or rather the long campaign against smoking.

I won't revisit the history of anti-smoking - if you want to know more read Chris Snowdon's 'A History of Anti-smoking' - but the decision to target smoking allowed public health people to link environment and personal choice. And, at the beginning of the campaign, smoking was more-or-less an all population problem - most people smoked. In this campaign (and it was, up to five or six years ago, very successful) the crucial moment wasn't Professor Doll linking smoking to lung cancer but the acceptance that passive smoking was a health problem. There may be some question over this belief but there can be no doubt that eliminating passive smoking provided the substantiation for other public health interventions in lifestyle choices.

Running in parallel with this idea of societal harm from the cumulative impact of lifestyle choices (typically drinking, smoking and overeating) was another idea - the passive consumer. Popular books such as Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' presented us as victims of marketing, led by the nose into excessive consumption, at the mercy of manipulative corporations. This idea's inception goes back to what TV viewers should see as the 'Golden Age' of advertising when discredited theories such as 'subliminal advertising' were proposed. However, it was another age of excess - from the mid-1980s for about ten years - that spawned the idea of consumption as sinful and the consumer as victim.

By portraying the individual as a hapless addict, some public health thinkers were able to justify extending public health interventions into those individuals' personal choices. Both because those choices affected wider society (such as by costing publicly-funded health services more) and because the individuals weren't making real choices but were merely responding to an 'intoxogenic' or 'obesogenic' environment.

To complete the picture (again Chris Snowdon has the definitive review here) we need to add an older tradition - moral disapproval. We know that the temperance movement has considerable influence within public health and this more considered moralising is compounded by the more hypocritical sensationalism in popular media.

These three factors - environment as a factor in personal choice, the passive consumer and a sense of moral offence - combine to create the platform on which today's public health policies are constructed and support for them from politicians and media is obtained. And it presupposes the significance of government in health:

...recognises the key role of the state, linked to a concern for the underlying socio-economic and wider determinants of health, as well as disease

So, when Bradford Council considers its new role as a public health authority, it brings its broader ideology into the discussion.  Onto the prevailing ideology of state-directed opposition to certain choice behaviours is latched the idea of 'health inequality'. At present nothing has changed, public health remains unchanged in Bradford. But, at some point, the imperative of inequality will mean that the idea of public health addressing environmental (and all-population) issues is further blurred as resource is targeted to those places suffering 'health inequality'.

My concern with all this mission creep is that the ideal of public health becomes lost. It seems evident that anti-smoking campaigns have stalled as campaigners focus their efforts on denormalisation rather than on the reduction of harm. And, with the apparent success (in political not health terms, I might add) of these approaches, other areas adopt the denormalisation palette rather than approaches aimed at reducing harm or preventing harm from occurring in the first place.

Also this focus on choice and lifestyle overlooks some important public health issues - reducing excess winter death in the elderly population, improving air quality in cities, extending vaccination programmes - in favour of media-friendly campaigns around smoking, drinking or fast food. We enlist other parts of the local authority into these campaigns - trading standards, planning, licensing - pulling them away from their own public safety and regulatory responsibilities.

My polemic - the stuff about nannying fussbucketry and health fascism - is a reaction to all this. And it reflects a real desire to get public health back to its roots - concerned with the real environment in which people live, with preventing the spread of disease and ill-health and with promoting well-being. None of these require the condemnation of lifestyle choices let alone their denormalisation.

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The truth about evidence-based policy making...

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Via Dick Puddlecote, the low down about the manipulation of truth by so-called academics:

Evidence based policymaking (EBPM) is about power: to decide what counts as evidence; to ignore or pay attention to particular studies; to link the evidence of a policy problem to a particular solution; and, to ensure that policymakers have the motive and opportunity to turn a solution into policy. Indeed, an attempt to portray EBPM as a technical or scientific process is often an attempt to exercise power: to rule some evidence in and most evidence out; and, to use particular forms of evidence to justify political action.

There you have it from Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Stirling Paul Cairney. This is, as I have said many a time, the misuse of science to justify political control. While there are no uniforms it is objectively little different to the abuse of science practiced by certain 20th century regimes.

Bear in mind that the writer is a sociologist not a scientist. And understand that it is people like Prof Cairney who are misusing the science - the scientists themselves are, in the main, just useful idiots providing the substance from which the control freaks of government can carve their judgemental, nannying state.

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More slippery slope - Tim Lang and the denormalisation of meat

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I think we've been here before. Professor Lang has been peddling his eco-waffle for some while, wrapping it in ethics, lies about animal welfare and misdirection on food safety. But these days, of course, it's 'climate change' that's the daddy in the Prof's campaign against an efficient, effective international food system that might actually feed the starving and ensure they get fed up to the likely peak population somewhere between 2030 and 2050.

Here's Prof Lang (via an excellent critique in Samizdata):

Without a shadow of a doubt, the ubiquity and cheapness of meat and meat products, as a goal for progress for Western agriculture, let alone developing world agriculture, is one we have to seriously question now for reasons of climate change, emissions, ecosystems and local reasons.

See what he's saying here? Yet again we get the "cheap food is bad" line from the food fascists. And not for the first time.

Is the priority to keep food cheap or to lower its carbon footprint and the cost of diet-related health care? Are consumers modern gods, or should they have their choices restricted before they even see the food on shelves? 

Prof Lang, of course, answers his questions in the affirmative - the idea of free trade in food sticks in the craw of his localist, eco-farming and sad obsession with claiming that the western diet is the cause of starvation elsewhere (it isn't). More to the point there's that "diet-related health care" - caused by the food industry rather than by people grazing on stupid quantities of processed carbohydrates (certainly not meat, it's not the burger but the bun that's the problem). No evidence to support Prof Lang's contention yet he makes it time and time again.

And - agreeing with Tim is one Camilla Toulmin who looks at meat production and concludes:

In 20 years’ time we will look back at it in the same way as we now look back at smoking as it was 20 years ago.

Yes folks - the denormalisation of meat begins!

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On the cult of public health...

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The transfer of public health from the clutches of central government and the NHS presents a real opportunity. An opportunity to appraise what it is we mean by ‘public health’ and how those considerable sums - £31 million in Bradford’s case – should be spent. Sadly, this won't happen.

Some while ago public health was captured by an aggressive, new puritan cult intent on using government funding to change the way people choose to live. This attack on the lifestyles of ordinary people is founded on a few principles:

• Denormalisation – the idea that those making certain choices should be ostracised since this will force them (assuming they want to be ‘part of society’) to change their wicked ways. This strategy is most advanced in the case of smoking (and anything that even looks like smoking) but the template of denormalisation is now applied to drinking and to eating certain sinful foods
• Government health spending is for the good not the evil – sinful people who smoke, drink and eat burgers, who might be a little short of breath or a couple of stone overweight represent a burden on health services meaning that the righteous do not receive the care they need. We should stop people smoking, drinking and eating burgers – not for their own good but for the ‘good’ of the NHS
• The poor can’t help it – far from the choice to smoke, drink and scoff Gregg’s sausage rolls being just that, a choice, it is in fact the fault of the makers of these products – “Big Tobacco”, “Big Food” and “Big Drink”. The poor are like helpless sheep thoughtlessly trotting into oblivion, responding to the sirens voice of advertising and the manipulation of faceless, besuited men
• Medicalisation – smoking, drinking, eating the wrong stuff – even sex – can be treated with medicines. And the pharmaceuticals industry has spent a great deal of time – and money – creating new illnesses and new conditions that require drugs. Thus conditions such as “female impotence” arrive following pharma funding and their capture of researchers and clinicians. This medicalisation underscores denormalisation by making lifestyles an illness rather than a choice.

And the application of these principles has now spawned a vast industry:

‘The NCD Alliance, a global advocacy organization representing a network of more than 2,000 civil society organizations led a major lobbying campaign, and mobilized its network to ensure this target was secured.’

These aren’t noble volunteers we’re speaking of here but committed campaigners paid by these ‘civil society organisations’ to lobby government and international organisations such as the World Health Organisation. And much of that funding comes from either the very governments being lobbied or from those who benefit from the medicalising of normal conditions.

Public health long since stopped being about great programmes such as building sewers, immunisation and clean air. Instead it has become a bitter little profession dedicated to finding fault with the choices that ordinary people make, with punishing them for enjoying a few simple little pleasures and with hectoring us about our lifestyles. None of this is really about our health. Rather it is about sin - about disapproving of what we do, of believing that the focus of our lives should be the search for eternity. Not in the afterlife but here on Earth.

And the believers in the public health creed say that this is done by a purposeful life dedicated to well-being - to the rejection of hedonism and its replacement with the comfort blanket of a false contentment. But worse these believers whip up hatred and disapproval of anyone who rejects their search for eternity, who believes that we only get a short time living and that our first duty is to have as much fun as we can in that short time.

This dreary and depressing cult is enough to drive you to drink!

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How 'denormalisation' works...the case of drinking

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You start with a little anecdote:

On a Friday night in the City a young professional woman collapses on the floor of the bar where she has been drinking with colleagues. She vomits, then passes out, and when an ambulance crew arrives they are verbally abused by the patient's friends, as the emergency service refuses to turn itself into a chauffeur to take the party home.

We are shocked especially when the article is accompanied by a rather old photograph of some young men drinking shots. How can this be happening! The writer continues with a sweeping statement - supported only by the anecdote - about (in this case) drinking:

This is all part of a British reality that refuses to conform to the cafe culture: the ideal that was supposed to emerge following the relaxation of UK licensing laws.

We are consuming more and more booze and it is killing us! Something must be done! But the evil producers of the deadly product are using their "power" to stop action:

The challenge in Scotland has been spearheaded by the Scotch Whisky Association – a trade body whose policy-making council is dominated by major drinks groups such as Johnnie Walker-owner Diageo, Pernod Ricard's Chivas Regal and Edrington, the home of Famous Grouse. Meanwhile, EU wine producers, concerned about how their exports to Britain will be hit, have launched their own campaign in Europe, albeit one that caused eyebrows to arch when the initial objection came from the seemingly unlikely quarter of Bulgaria. Conspiracy theorists even pondered if the former communist state challenged British policy with the assistance of the global drinks industry lobby.

See! Look! This international cartel of booze peddlers can buy a whole country's parliament!

At no point in this discussion is there any dispassionate appraisal of the facts. This is because the facts are not helpful. Take the uncomfortable fact that, for 16-24 year olds, 36% of men and 47% of women report not having had a drink at all in the week prior to survey and not a single young person reported drinking every day. And drinking rates are declining:

There has been a long-term downward trend in the proportion of adults who reported drinking in the week prior to interview. In 1998, 75% of men and 59% of women drank in the week prior to interview compared to 68% and 54% respectively in 2010. Similarly, the proportion of adults drinking on 5 or more days in the previous week has also decreased since 1998; in 1998 24% of men drank on 5 or more days in the previous weeks, compared to 17% in 2010, the equivalent figures for women were 13% and 10% respectively.

But you won't read this facts in a story promoting the denormalisation cause -  they prefer scare stories and sensationalism:

If one piece of common ground exists, it seems to be this: when it comes to Britain's out-of-control drinking culture, some one needs to call time, gentlemen and ladies, please.

Well no, that isn't common ground. We did something. We promoted an adult approach - great licensing flexibility, rises in duty and a public health strategy centred on "inform and persuade". And this has worked - consumption of alcohol has fallen and continues to fall.

For the denormalisers, the temperance campaigners and the prohibitionists to win the day it is necessary for drinking - or for that matter eating burgers or chocolate bars - to be causing a 'crisis' that requires something to be done. And since the statistics don't support the case, the nannying fussbuckets resort to anecdote. The next stage will be simply making stuff up. Just watch.

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Prohibition doesn't work does it? More evidence from Bradford...

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The sale of 'illegal' cigarettes and tobacco is growing - according to this article it 'costs' the HMRC "£10 million a day". We all know it's growing and we all know the reasons - high rates of duty and the ease of smuggling. Here's one example from a court case in Bradford:

Steven Brocklehurst, for Mahmad, said his client took over the shop in May last year, at which time it became apparent there were people who, on going abroad – particularly to Poland – would buy tobacco as part of their duty free allowance and sell it on to the shop owner.

“Clearly it was a process that had been going on for some time with the previous owner,” Mr Brocklehurst said. 

So these nice Eastern European folk were funding their trips home by gaming the margins between UK prices and Polish prices - a margin made up almost entirely of tax. And the problem is growing - here's the chap from West Yorkshire Trading Standards:

“The fact that so many cheap, illicit cigarettes are on sale is seriously undermining Government efforts to encourage people to quit smoking. In addition those who deal in illicit tobacco are evading tax which has an obvious damaging effect on legitimate business and the wider economy.” 

And look at the downside risks - 60 hours community work and a fine of less than two grand.

Denormalisation - prohibition by another name - simply doesn't work, does it!

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A new front opens in the denormalisation of drinking...

One or two people thought I was exaggerating recently when I made this comment in a post about CAMRA:

Only teetotallers will be recruited by the NHS and having alcohol in their private cars will lead to some workers being sacked.

It's starting already:

Public listed companies should have to outline their policy on their staff's alcohol use as an explicit requirement, according to Alcohol Concern.

And there's already a handy business - sucking up to government and the prohibitionists - primed to take full advantage of employers who want to dictate the alcohol use of those who work for them:

Research carried out by BreathScan, an alcohol-screening supplier, showed that only 22% of FTSE 250 companies have clear alcohol awareness policies. BreathScan looked at published materials such as annual reports and websites for each company, as well as contacting their HR departments to ask whether or not they had an alcohol policy.

And what exactly is "alcohol-screening" you may ask:

Combining leading science innovations and clever design, we provide people the means to effect simple, precise, low-cost alcohol screening and the thinking, programmes and products to encourage broader, positive changes in attitudes to responsible alcohol consumption.

Which is code for selling Breathalyzer kits to businesses and, to justify this, the firm repeats all the familiar lies about rising consumption of alcohol (it's actually falling), about the cost of drinking to business and the "no safe level" of drinking myth.

The message here isn't that firms should be aware of drinking - nothing new there for businesses where workers operate machinery or drive - but that drinking should be actively discouraged. And that firms should police the drinking habits of their employees.

How long before the NHS stops employing drinkers?

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Denormalising food - sugar this time...

Some (very tasty) death on a plate

And off we go again - these people just won't let up! We're stronger, fitter, longer-lived and happier than ever yet they want to scare everybody into changing their diet and governments into draconian, offensive controls.  Welcome to another denormalisation crowd - the sugar police:

...should we establish a drinking age for sugary sodas? According to UC San Francisco pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, the answer is emphatically yes. He says that added sweeteners have health effects comparable to alcohol and tobacco, and should be regulated accordingly. In a comment piece for the journal Nature, Lustig and his colleagues argue that the state should selectively block access to sugar, using some pretty stiff rules. 

Got that folks - sugar must be controlled because it's killing us! And what does this nannying fussbucket propose?

...establishing taxes on "sweetened fizzy drinks (soda), other sugar-sweetened beverages (for example, juice, sports drinks and chocolate milk) and sugared cereal." In addition, they advocate that we reduce the availability of sugar, particularly to children. This restriction would make it more difficult for vending machines to sell sweet drinks and sugary snacks in schools and in workplaces, building on already existing regulations that have removed sodas from some schools.

But this is just for starters - there's a main course:

States could apply zoning ordinances to control the number of fast-food outlets and convenience stores in low-income communities, and especially around schools, while providing incentives for the establishment of grocery stores and farmer's markets. Another option would be to limit sales during school operation, or to designate an age limit (such as 17) for the purchase of drinks with added sugar, particularly soda. 

Well the planning control is already something UK local councils are introducing for fast-food - it's only a short step to the wrong kind of convenience stores (the ones that sell stuff people want to buy, for example).

And there's a handy "Big Sugar" to blame when people carry on eating the evil stuff:

We recognize that societal intervention to reduce the supply and demand for sugar faces an uphill political battle against a powerful sugar lobby, and will require active engagement from all stakeholders.

Just like the ever more draconian smoking controls, just like the campaigns against "cheap" alcohol and just like the moralising lectures about gambling and borrowing, this is simply an attack on a lifestyle people choose. It really is none of these unpleasant nannies' business whether people choose to eat sugar - death on a plate - rather than the carefully knitted organic lentils on offer at the Church of Public Health.

And, finally, don't think filling up on fruit is a solution - guess who the biggest baddest sugar is according to Mr Lustig?

If international bodies are truly concerned about public health, they must consider limiting fructose...

Naturally occurring, beneficial and energy-packed fructose is right in there with the denormalisation!

All you people who cheered at the smoking ban while scoffing on iced doughnuts. Who argue for minimum alcohol pricing while sucking Pepsi through a straw. All you athletes with your sugar-loaded energy drinks and health freaks with your fruit smoothies.

You're next...

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In which CAMRA join the "we hate drinkers" brigade (plus of course smokers)

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I'm not a member of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), never have been and have no intention of becoming one. Not because CAMRA didn't do a great job back in the 1970s and 1980s rescuing us from dire, barely drinkable ales but because they have become an organisation with no point other than to place the imprimateur of their brand on pubs. And to campaign alongside the prohibitionists, temperance advocates and assorted nannying fussbuckets against the ordinary drinker.

So it is great news that The George Hotel in Cullingworth was named "Pub of the Season" by Bradford CAMRA - not bad going after less than a year since the folk at Old Spot Brewery (more specifically, Chris and Jo) took over. I can recommend a visit should you find yourself in Cullingworth.

The bad news is that the other thing CAMRA have stamped their approval on is a report written by lefty think-tank IPPR into why so many pubs closed. Apparently it isn't anything to do with the smoking ban at all because (wait for it):

Our brief analysis of why pub closure rates differ between parliamentary constituencies indicates that there is a weak positive correlation between closure rates and smoking rates in England. However, this may be hiding other explanatory variables: for example, it may be simply because smoking rates are higher in more deprived communities.

Now the denizens of pubs pre-ban will know a couple of things - in wet-led pubs in urban areas around three-quarters or more of regulars were smokers. And, as we've all noticed, it's these pubs that have closed. The big food-oriented pubs with large gardens on the edge of town or in country villages haven't closed in the same numbers (although I noticed that The Triangle at Triangle - perhaps the only village named after a trademark - is boarded up).

Instead of this, the IPPR/CAMRA wants us to believe that the main reason for people stopping going to the pub is that booze is too cheap in supermarkets. Indeed, IPPR/CAMRA go on to say - without evidence or foundation - that:

The supermarkets are able to use their market power to ensure that increased duty is not passed on by their suppliers.

They can also afford to sell alcohol at below cost and as a loss leader to entice customers through their doors and spend on other products. 

I'm pretty sure that both these statements are untrue. Even the prohibitionists don't think these statements are true, for heaven's sake!

And tell me, do you really believe that that nice Mr Smith who used to come in, sit on the stool at the end of the snug bar and smoke his pipe isn't coming in because he's buying 38p cans of watery lager from the Co-op? No, he's sat in his living room watching the telly, drinking a glass of bottled ale and smoking his pipe. And he's not coming into the pub again (except once a month with the local history club) because he can't smoke that pipe.

And CAMRA along with the idiots at Greene King and the nutters at Diageo have fallen hook, line and sinker for the nannying fussbuckets' agenda. Introduce a minimum price per unit for alcohol (just 40p say the bearded ale-suppers) and it will all be fine! Except it won't.

That 40p will soon be 50p. Then 60p and in no time £1. And the prohibitionists, nannying fussbuckets and adherents to the Church of Public Health will still scream about the terrible damage alcohol is wreaking on society.

So we'll get advertising restrictions and advertising bans. We'll get licensing restrictions and regulatory controls. High alcohol content beers will be banned. Warning labels will be placed on alcohol products - getting more and more extreme with each new iteration.

Soon universities and colleges will close their bars. Some will ban alcohol on campus. Only teetotallers will be recruited by the NHS and having alcohol in their private cars will lead to some workers being sacked.

And still the prohibitionists will scream about the evils of drink. We'll still get haggard doctors frowningly explaining how even one sip of booze could lead to alcoholism, liver disease and cancer.

This is not what CAMRA want - this is an organisation supposed to be an advocate for a healthy, mature and quality approach to boozing. Yet they are lining up with the ghastly people whose aim is to "denormalise" drinking, to make it something that normal people don't do - to kill the very think that CAMRA campaign for.

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It isn’t the drinkers we should worry about but the warped folk who hate drinking

Today the government published its Public HealthFramework setting out the purpose and objectives of this part of health spending. I don’t propose to spend a great deal of time boring you to death with what it contains. Suffice it to say that the devil will be in how the details are interpreted by the public health practitioners on the ground (we can expect still more of the ill-informed campaigns about booze, fags and burgers).

Nevertheless, here’s a flavour:

The whole system will be refocused around achieving positive health outcomes for the population and reducing inequalities in health, rather than focused on process targets, and will not be used to performance manage local areas. This Public Health Outcomes Framework sets the context for the system, from local to national level. The framework will set out the broad range of opportunities to improve and protect health across the life course and to reduce inequalities in health that still persist.

Now that’s clear, I’d like to talk about the “public health problem” that is drinking. And to ask – notwithstanding the liberal argument that it’s none of the government’s business – what the best strategy is to reducing the overall harm caused by alcohol. Currently the medical and public health professions argue for draconian measures:

Effective, evidenced-based public health measures do not include nudging people into healthy behaviours or getting NHS staff to lecture patients on healthy lifestyles. They include measures such as raising taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, fatty foods, and sugary drinks, reducing junk food and drink advertising to children, and restricting hours on sale of alcoholic drinks. 

Yet, as the government acknowledge, such an approach hasn’t worked in Finland:

“We are working in a very, very cynical environment at the moment where nobody believes we can do anything on alcohol consumption unless we price it out of the market. Finland would suggest that doesn’t work.”

So, instead of looking at these aggressive fiscal and regulatory measures, we should perhaps consider whether liberalisation might work. There is some evidence that society’s attitude to drinking is an important factor in its impact:

We, as a culture, set the rules. When they're broken it's not solely the fault of a drink or even five. It's the underlying message accompanying the way that we drink. That's something I believe we can change by recognizing drinking as a meaningful activity and by addressing problem drinking, which involves a more complete assessment, with culturally relevant programs and not with fruitless pleas to "drink less."

When the last Labour government liberalised licensing regulations (in 2003), there was an outcry from the grumpier tabloids. We were told that “24-hour drinking” would result in chaos as crime rose, disease spread and hospitals filled up with fighting drunken youth. So what’s the truth of this liberalisation?

Using the original method of conversion to units for comparability with earlier years, in 2006, men drank an average of 14.9 units a week (equivalent to about seven and a half pints of beer), around 2.3 units less than they were drinking in 1998. Average weekly consumption among women increased from 6.5 units in 1998 to 7.6 units in 2002 but had decreased to 6.3 units in 2006

OK, so I won’t (unlike too many public health people) make a causal link here but, since the liberalisation of alcohol licensing, consumption has fallen steadily and continues to fall. Far from the changes resulting in an epidemic of binge-drinking, we have seen an increase in more responsible, moderate attitudes to drinking. And the biggest fall (according to the ONS and NHS) in consumption has been among 18-24 year old men.

It seems that greater awareness of the risks associated with drinking and a society that sees drinking in moderation as a good, sociable thing to do, results in alcohol becoming less of a problem. Yet we still hear – almost without cease – how alcohol is a scourge. Here’s an American take – but it could be the UK:

The CDC tells us that binge drinking is a "bigger problem than previously thought," suggesting that it can (and often does) result in risky behavior, leading to violence, suicide, spread of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancy, car crashes, and alcohol dependence. They also insinuate that binge drinking causes crime. By their measure, binge drinkers rack up over 223 billion dollars annually.

Yet most drinkers – including plenty who binge – don’t do any of these things. They don’t start fights, spread disease, kill themselves, get the girlfriend pregnant or wind up in hospital. They go home, go to bed and get up the following day to continue their otherwise normal lives. The liberalisation of licensing was a boon to these folk.

It meant they didn’t get tempted to buy three drinks at ten to eleven and drink them before getting turfed out at twenty past. It allowed them to finish their conversations, savour the last part of the wine or maybe a whisky and then make their way home with the gentle buzz of a good night.

The people who want us to be monitored, questioned, lectured, nagged – “denormalised” to use the chosen term – are those who want to spoil the pleasure of a drink for the outside chance of there being one or two fewer chronic alcoholics. It won’t work, it will spoil people’s pleasure and it is an act of bitter prejudice against something that has been part of human culture since we first stepped out from the African forests millions of years ago.

It isn’t the drinkers we should worry about but the warped folk who hate drinking – they are the ones who should be stopped. Banned maybe?

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The Web is Addictive! Something must be done...

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The web is corrupting people's minds - and some are addicted to the Internet:

Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests.

We need the following clearly*:

• Guidelines for recommended maximum exposure to the Internet
• An age restriction preventing harm to children
• Taxes on Internet access to begin the process of denormalisation
• Public health campaigns highlighting the risk of Internet use
• Work towards a minimum price for Internet access

We must act now to save lives!

*I take this from the public health response to tsimilar problems with alcohol, tobacco and other things that affect people's brains. Something must be done!

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...denormalisation doesn't work

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So I guess it will be a total ban next!

Furthermore, whilst there has been a downward trend in smoking prevalence over several decades, this appears to have stagnated since 2007.

And what has happened since 2007? Chris Snowden provides a brief guide:

One of the world's most draconian smoking bans (2007). Graphic health warnings (2008). Adverts showing fish hooks severing the faces of smokers (2007, below). Massive tax rises (20% increase since January 2010). Counterfeit cigarettes openly sold in the street (2010). Nutters demanding outdoor smoking bans (2011).

Since 2007, the UK has sat proudly atop of the 'Tobacco Control Scale' league table. Like Ireland, Britain did everything the anti-smoking 'experts' said we should. What has been the reward? Stagnation.

Denormalisation simply doesn't work, we now have a situation where smoking (soon to be followed by drinking) moves from the public, visible and legal to to private, invisible and illegal. With the result that consumption rises - yes, rises (I say this with a modicum of confidence since at least a fifth of tobacco, probably more, is 'non UK duty paid').

It'll have to be a total ban won't it! But the politicians won't do that - a third of the population smokes.

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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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It had to happen...

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...the denormalisation of coffee commences:

Researchers found large discrepancies in caffeine levels in espressos, contradicting the widespread belief that retailers follow a uniform set of guidelines.

Medical experts warned that the differences were potentially putting pregnant women at greater risk of miscarriage. They found that café customers were unaware of the wide variations in caffeine levels. 

Watch it grow, folks!

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Enterprise and the denormalisation of food..a tale out of school

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If you introduce a strict "healthy food" policy there are consequences. And one is enterprise and initiative:

A schoolboy has been suspended for selling chocolate and crisps to pupils. Tommie Rose, 12, set up a playground business after being inspired by TV shows Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice.

His family say he was making up to £60 a day selling chocolate, crisps, and drink at Oasis Academy in Salford. But the school has a strict healthy-eating policy and teachers say sales between students are banned.

So the school doesn't sell what it - wholly arbitrarily - determines to be "unhealthy" and Tommy fills in the gap. This seems entirely the consequence of this schools offensive and illiberal policies - reinforced by the "only what we sanction" policy:

Principal Patrick Ottley-O’Connor said pupils were encouraged to develop their business skills through activities such as growing vegetables for sale.

He said: "The safe environment where our students, learn and develop skills, including business and enterprise skills, are facilitated by the high standard of behaviour expected within the academy. The private selling of goods is not permitted and any persistent breach of the code of conduct is dealt with firmly, but supportively through parental engagement."

Bringing up children to be good, compliant little conformists. Crushing the spirit of enterprise. British education at its finest!

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Denormalising butter...

There is sits in your fridge. A glistening slab of evil intent. Saturated fats. Sinful fats. Waiting just to do its wicked job, the raise your cholesterol levels, to fur up your arteries and to drag you inexorably towards that devastating coronary heart attack or that debilitating stroke.

And there are children’s poems featuring this dread substance, this cause of obesity. Can this be allowed?

The King asked
The Queen, and
The Queen asked
The Dairymaid:
"Could we have some butter for
The Royal slice of bread?"

It’s mad, I know. Mad and stupid. But the ‘denormalisation’ of foods mankind has eaten since before we invented writing continues apace. And butter has moved – with the decision of the Danish government to slap on a ‘fat tax’ – to the head of the denormalisation queue:

Mr Cameron told the Conservative conference that a similar move should not be ruled out in the UK.

“I think it is something that we should look at,” he said in an interview with Five Live. “The problem in the past when people have looked at using the tax system in this way is the impact it can have on people on low incomes. But frankly, do we have a problem with the growing level of obesity? Yes.

“I am worried about the costs to the health service, the fact that some people are going to have shorter lives than their parents.”

Understand that this proposal isn’t a tax on those foods Guardian readers disapprove of, those greasy burgers beloved of the lower orders. It’s at tax on cheese, on butter on Aberdeen Angus beef steaks – on some of Britain’s finest artisan foods. And the purpose – well that is clear. The intention is to gradually eliminate saturated fats from most people’s diets – the aim is the denormalisation of butter.

I could at this point argue that this whole effort is misplaced – saturated fats simply aren’t the primary cause of obesity:

Processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat today in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does—a finding that has serious implications for new dietary guidelines expected this year.

It’s filling up on cheap pizza, ramming down vast bowls of “healthy” pasta and foot long subs that are the problem rather than the butter and the cheese.  But this isn’t the main point.

I could also remark that rates of obesity – especially among men – are no longer rising:

Despite the government ignoring the anti-obesity lobby's urgent suggestions for traffic light labelling on food and suchlike, the latest figures show that obesity amongst men has fallen to 22% and the female obesity rate has fallen to 24%.

So we’re stepping up a campaign in a battle we’re already winning. But again, that isn’t the point.

The point is that the tax would seal an abominable relationship between the nannying fussbuckets in our health system and the rapacious maw of the treasury. The men with calculators will see billions in revenue from ratcheting up the ‘fat tax’ by above inflation each year egged on by the Church of Public Health who will – without the need for any evidential support – propagandise that such actions are making us healthier and happier.

If some people wish for a dull, flavourless existence then they can give up butter, cheese and beef dripping. But there is no place for these to be ‘denormalised’ by those who cannot see that obesity is self-inflicted, brought on by cramming our faces with stodge and sugar while our only exercise is to stretch out a hand to grasp the TV remote control. It really is that simple – so why tax my little pleasures because somebody else has got too fat by eating too much?

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