Soho is Britain's unhealthiest place? Jeffrey Bernard would be pleased!

Look how unhealthy it all is - drinking, eating. Shocking.

I don't know where the quote comes from but, as kids, we used to exclaim "give me temptation, brother" when confronted with something especially lovely - cream cakes, ice cream, warm pork pie. It would seem that the irresistible nature of these temptations - fast food, pubs and assorted other dens on iniquity - is the main reason for the UK's health inequalities:

Soho is the unhealthiest place to live in Britain...

I can hear a gentle chuckle from the grave of Jeffrey Bernard, legendary Soho denizen, at this shocking revelation - as Jeffrey put it:

"I've always been drawn to the things I was told not to do. Drink, sex. God! how I have loved sex and racing. They're against the rules and that's why I like them. I never liked anything that was good for me, like All-Bran and fresh air. I like the things that kill me."

So it is with Soho. But not, apparently, apparently with Great Torrington in north Devon. Probably because there's precious little to do (certainly in the category of "things that kill me") in Great Torrington. That being said, Torrington is a lovely little market town, especially if you like buying the crystal glasses in which to serve your champagne or malt whisky.

After Great Torrington, the remainder of the healthy places are in further flung parts of rural Scotland, not a thing to inspire folk who like a good time. Meanwhile, the really unhealthy places are mostly in central London. So how did the researchers arrived at the ranking:

Researchers analysed a range of lifestyle and environmental measures including levels of air pollution, access to amenities such as fast food outlets or pubs, and proximity to health services including GPs in addition to parks and recreational spaces.

It probably isn't so surprising that London fares poorly - it's densely populated, as a large city inevitably has poorer air quality than wide open Devon countryside, and - especially in the tourist magnet of the West End - is rammed full of pubs, bars and restaurants.

But why - given all the stuff about the 'heart of the community' and so forth - do these researchers cite the presence of pubs as an indicator of a place being 'unhealthy'? I'm guessing that the continued lie about drinking - any drinking - being bad for you sits at the heart of all this. The good news, despite the new puritans' best efforts to get them all closed, is that most people are still reasonable close to their nearest pub:

...on average, individuals in Great Britain are just as close to a pub or bar as they are to their nearest GP, 1.1 km [0.68 miles]

If we're talking about community then, frankly, having a pub people might visit once or twice a week is a darned sight more important than a GP surgery they might visit twice a year. And at least with pubs you can walk in when you need it rather than having to negotiate a complicated, unfriendly and unresponsive appointments system.

Our researchers (surprise, surprise - this is public health fussbucketry at its finest) also have an issue with gambling. They're shocked that most people live within "a short drive) - I'm surprised they're not agitated about folk having to drive there - of a betting shop.

What the research really shows is that things like fast food outlets, betting shops and pubs are more concentrated in densely populated urban areas. They also observe that lots of rural areas have a really lousy (on top of the deranged appointment systems and unfriendly hours beloved of GPs) access to primary heath care.

The premise for these researchers appears to be that the very presence of these bad things makes people ill. Unfortunately for our fussbuckets, either they don't make people ill or else people are resisting the temptations of booze, burgers and betting shops. The male life expectancy for Westminster (home to glorious Soho) residents is 81.4 years whereas those Great Torrington chaps down in North Devon peg it on average at a mere 79.4 years.

So it would seem that the effect of all that unhealthiness - pubs, bars, casinos, late night kebab shops and so forth - has precisely zero effect on the health of local residents. The research we're being sold here as "...an important tool for citizens and policymakers alike..." is pretty much useless as a guide to whether or not the environment in which people live is healthy (Shotley Gate, the little town across the estuary from Harwich gets fingered for unhealthiness which seems to reinforce the arbitrary nature of the model - I use this term loosely - adopted by the researchers).

And while we're about all this - central London lacks parks? Have these people never been there?

The green bits are parks. Massive parks. Soho is the redlined box.

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Drinking is central to civilisation...

Alcohol - wine, beer, cider - has been part of human life since before written records began. More than anything else it is the lubricant of society, the cause of conviviality and the begetter of truth. It's also the likely reason we're civilised:

For a long time, humans traveled often and foraged for food, rather than growing it. And that worked pretty well, so anthropologists have long puzzled over why people started settling in a single spot. One benefit to nesting: growing grapes and grains, and staying in a place long enough to brew beverages for weeks or months, as beer and wine require. "Some posit this as the reason that civilization began in villages surrounded by golden fields of barley and rows of grapevines on the hills," Money writes.

And that natural fermentation process, the divine blessing of yeast, made possible those other things central to the pleasures of our lives: bread, chocolate, coffee. Drinking really is central to human civilisation - taking it away, prohibiting its blessings is a terrible, terrible sin.

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Quote of the Day: Dry January is puritan finger-wagging

From Sophie Artherton in the Morning Advertiser:

If someone needs to be enabled to take control of their relationship with alcohol, or they drink so much that they need a whole month off from drinking, I’d call that a drink dependency problem. By its own definitions Dry January​ isn’t fit to solve that.

If Dry January​ isn’t about ‘alcohol dependency problems’ then what it amounts to is puritan finger pointing at people who enjoy a drink. Those behind the movement seem to want us to believe that anyone and everyone who drinks is at risk of becoming alcoholic, taking no account of the many reasons why some succumb to the disease.

Absolutely - Dry January is just another tool from the temperance movement to demonise drinking and we should reject it totally.

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It's time to close down public health and get our lives back

It has to stop. There is no basis in protecting health. It is quite simply driven by the mission of public health to treat smokers as pariahs, people to be pushed to the margins of society:

The smoking ban should be extended to include all outdoor public areas, according to health experts.

Exclusion zones should stop smokers lighting up in parks, pub and restaurant gardens, at public events and shopping areas.

All university campuses and schools, beaches and sports and leisure facilities should also fall under the crackdown.

Imagine Glastonbury, Reading or Leeds Festival without smoking (of any kind). Consider what will happen to your local when smokers have to move half a street away to enjoy a fag. Those smokers - getting on for a fifth of the population - won't be there. And what happens when a fifth or more of your business goes away? No more local pub. Half the nations festivals and concerts unviable. Empty bars. Closed restaurants. Hundreds of thousands more jobs destroyed by public health.

I'll say it again - there is no health ground for this at all. None. Banning smoking indoors at least had the merit of a very marginal health benefit to non-smokers working in a smoky environment. These proposals from the Royal Society of Public Health are quite straightforwardly an attack on smokers and their right to make the personal choice to inhale tobacco smoke.

I haven't smoked for over ten years but I don't see why those who choose to smoke should be ostracised, excluded and treated like pariahs. In fact I find such an idea to be offensive and the people making it to be the worst sort of hideous fussbucket. The fanatics of public health aren't going to stop until all of the pleasures on their list of sins are marginalised - booze, fags, burgers, fizzy drinks, red meat, bacon, cheese, chocolate, boiled sweets, jam, cheese, cake, cream: all labelled, resitricted, controlled, hidden away, taxed and if they can get away with it banned altogether.

Children will be force fed a grey, dull vegetable diet washed down with tepid water. The legion of tutting health worrywarts will peer over their specs at mums who let their kids have a Happy Meal. We'll be weighed, measured, lined up, checked and made to fill in forms describing, in ever more detail, our bad habits. All so some public health "nurse" can lecture us about eating or drinking the grey uninteresting pap that the Church of Public Health recommends.

None of this is about making our lives better. It's not about our health. It's about an ideology of control. A belief that because the state provides healthcare this somehow gives them the right to tell us how to live our lives, to ostacise us for smoking, to denormalise drinking, to tax sugar, and to force manufacturers to take anything approximating to taste out of the food we buy.

It's time we stopped indulging these nannying fussbuckets. Time we told them to butt out of our lives. Time to point out that whether we smoke, drink, eat cake or go to a burger bar is absolutely none of their bloody business. Time to close down public health.

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Scribblings - on pubs, snooker, loneliness and the curse of time

I don't know about you but I think pubs are pretty important. Mostly because they sell beer and people I like go there but also because these things are central to English culture. A while ago the Joseph Rowntree Foundation conducted a study in the South Pennine village of Denholme (which for the record has a fantastic pub - one of the best - called the New Inn) that looked at loneliness. For all that this was a good study - I've blogged about it a couple of times - Old Mudgie reminds us that the pub is a sovereign remedy against being alone:

Until various illnesses put it beyond him, my late dad used to go out for a pint or two at lunchtime a couple of days a week. My mum would ask “what’s the point of that if you never talk to anyone?” but that is missing the point. If nothing more, it provides a change of scenery, a bit of mental stimulation and something to look forward to. Sometimes you exchange a bit of conversation, other times all you do its talk to the bar staff, but anything’s better than nothing.

And our resident pub grump went on to suggest that maybe pubs need to think about design and layout - perhaps to better allow the chance of interaction between those like his Dad on their visits. It's a pity (and I blogged about this too that the smoking ban gave people - men mostly - an excuse never to leave the armchair in the shed).

This neatly takes us to pub games on the telly - snooker and darts mostly - and Frank Davis's gentle rant about how the presentation of these sports has been sanitised. No longer do we see Bill Werbenuik downing a pint a round or Alex Higgins inhaling 20 Bensons during a match:

But what really made it popular were the cast of characters it introduced to the world. And none was more flamboyant than two-times snooker world champion Alex Higgins. If any single person made snooker popular, it was him. And he was a bad boy. He picked fights with people, and threw TV sets out of windows, and got fined and banned. And he’d sit in his chair by the snooker table drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.

The smoking bit was finished by the ban but I can't see - other than wanting to make snooker even more dull than it is already - why players can't drink. Indeed Bill Werbenuik famously drank enormous quanitites of booze so as to correct a tic that affected his game.

In the end the deal here is how we spend our time. And, as you all know I hope, the 'protestant work ethic' shtick needs putting to bed. It's not that when we commit to doing something, we shouldn't put in the effort to do it well but rather that we're not put on this earth to slave our guts out putting food on the table, clothes on out backs and a roof over our heads. Or if you're not a fan of the god stuff - that stuff used to be the fate of man (and it remains so for many millions in the world) but technology, specialisation and the wonders of neoliberalism have made it possible for us to spend a little more of that time of the things we get pleasure from.

That's when we get to grips with time maybe?

Since Einstein we have come to realise that everything is relative. Place a clock in a space craft and whisk it away at close to the speed of light and the on board clock would keep different to time to an identical clock placed in my study. Actually the clock in my study hasn't worked for years but I'm too damn idle to change the battery. Thus it seems that time, and everything else for that matter, is simply a problem of perspective; a relationship to a frame of reference. This is not to say that 'time' does not exist. In fact Einstein believed in the concept of time, but a time married to the universe. His concept of time could only exist within the reference of space-time and could not be divorced and act as an independent entity.

Got that? Not sure whether this explains how slowly time passes when your team's a goal up with five minutes to go. Or how quickly time goes when you've a 12 noon deadline for a funding application. But as they say time waits for nobody.

Might as well party then!

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How public health and temperance campaigners exploit children

Prohibition and temperance aren't the children of health concerns but rather the offspring of a certain type of christian judgmentalism. But perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that today's dominant religious faith - heath and wellbeing - has adopted the moralism of a previous age in its desire to have us all live a dull but righteous life so we can live forever. How could you indulge in pleasures that may, as a side effect, shorten your life?

And just as with all good religions, our Church of Public Health creates its myths and legends as convenient fairy tales designed to sway the gullible to the cause of living forever. Here's a classic:

Alcohol is being sold at "pocket money" prices across the UK, with products commonly bought by underage drinkers among the cheapest, research by a campaign group suggests.

The Alcohol Health Alliance said white cider - sold for as little as 16p per unit of alcohol - is favoured by teens.

The story in question combines two entirely separate and essentially unrelated pieces of information into a scary story about how young girls are being sucked into a terrible world of self-destruction, harm and death by the purveyors of booze at those 'pocket money prices'.

The first piece of information tells us that:

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study of its 35 member countries found that 31% of 15-year-old girls reported having been drunk at least twice, compared with 26% of boys (which is in line with the OECD average).

Note the wording - 'drunk at least twice'. What the research tells us is that some girls self report that they have been drunk on two or more occasions. And that seven out of ten girls say they haven't been drunk on even two occasions. The rest are the rebels who maybe drank a few glasses at Christmas or shared a half bottle of vodka at a sleepover. There really isn't anything to get worried about in these statistics. And let's be clear that they've absolutely nothing at all to do with the other information in the story - the bit about 'pocket money prices':

The Alcohol Health Alliance (AHA), a grouping of more than 40 organisations including medical colleges and health charities, surveyed the cost of 480 products on sale in major supermarkets and off-licences in London, north-east England, north-west-England and Scotland.

Its research found both Asda and Tesco to be selling perry at 19p per unit, while the same drink was available at Sainsbury's for 22p per unit. Morrisons was selling cider at 20p per unit.

Now let's set these temperance folk a challenge. Take a 15 year old girl, give her some pocket money and tell her to go and buy some of that 19p per unit perry in ASDA. It's not going to happen, there is no way they'll be able to blag their way through this one. The girl will not succeed in buying any sort of booze, not even cheap white cider at 'pocket money prices' in any supermarket (or for that matter off license). If the 15 year old girls are drinking it's because they've bought in illegally from a smuggler, stolen it or most like been bought it by someone old enough to make the purchase. And, as the distinct lack of drunk 15 year old girls staggering round our streets tells us, this really isn't common or much of a problem.

So, given that the evidence is that booze at 'pocket money prices' isn't driving high levels of teenaged bozziness, why are the Alcohol Health Alliance and other fussbuckets so keen to make out that it is? Here's a clue:

The chairman of the AHA, Prof Sir Ian Gilmore, the former president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: "In spite of a government commitment to tackle cheap, high-strength alcohol, these products are still available at pocket money prices."

Calling for an increase in duty on cider, Prof Gilmore said: "In addition, we need minimum unit pricing. This would target the cheap, high strength products drunk by harmful drinkers whilst barely affecting moderate drinkers, and it would leave pub prices untouched."

This isn't about those girls at all, it's about 'high strength products drunk by harmful drinkers' who the AHA, as good temperance folk, heartily disapprove of. Now some of these people are pretty unsavoury and can cause problems with their behaviour but they're still adults with choice and agency. And making the booze more expensive won't change much - except they'll eat less, skip the rent (and get evicted) and spend more time panhandling other folk for the wherewithal to buy the newly expensive white cider. The more creative ones might make their own - it's really easy.

What the AHA are doing here is playing the 'for the children' card by hinting that children are the ones supping the white cider and therefore we should do something to stop them. Hence the reference to 'pocket money' and the talk about girls - we're having our emotional strings played here by organisations with over 100 years spent perfecting the demonisation of drinking. Prof. Gilmore and his fellow fussbuckets don't just want to stop 'harmful drinking', what they want is to denormalise drinking, to make it something banned, controlled, taxed, price-fixed and confiscated. They want to take you pleasure away simply because they disapprove of that pleasure.

And to achieve this end, the Church of Public Health will conflate unrelated data, will exaggerate research results, will speak of exceptional cases as if they were commonplace, and - when all this fails - they'll just straight up lie.

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Baby Boomers - living out the great binge!

The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.

So said Kingsley Amis and for once he was right. Yet we're collapsing again into the stew of temperance by allowing the obsession with living forever to dictate to those who make the rules. And it seems that us Baby Boomers are the last bastions of sense and decency - OK call it hedonism - in this world. We created the great binge!

Between 1992 and 2006, the average weekly alcohol consumption for people aged 45–64 (capturing the majority of baby boomers) rose by 85%, compared with a 50% rise in those aged 65 and over, and a 45% rise in those aged 16–24. As baby boomers have aged, follow-up studies with this cohort reveal similar findings. Between 2005 and 2013, the percentage of men drinking eight or more units of alcohol (the equivalent of four pints of normal strength beer) on any one day in the past week changed by only 5% in the over 65s. In contrast, this rate of drinking fell by 30% among 16–24s, 19% among 22–44s, and 12% among those aged 45–64.

They hate us for this those New Puritans with their temperance.  The cult of the NHS demands that any health problem that might be seen as 'self-inflicted' must be dealt with. Drinking, smoking, eating too many burgers - these things are not to be tolerated. And when you or I respond with "it's none of your business", the fanatics from the Church of Public Health peer down at you and say: "but it is, think of the cost to the NHS". The argument is closed, action must be taken to stop us from enjoying ourselves by drinking just a little more than they think we should. For some - egged on by the old temperance lobby - even the merest drop of the demon drink will lead to perdition and doom (defined these days as a 'cost to the NHS').

The latest in a long line of misperceptions is that we - the baby boomers that is - don't understand that boozing carries health risks:

Trying to change baby boomers’ behaviour and attitudes towards drinking and drug use is a tough sell to a generation now steeped in lifelong attitudes shaped by a lack of awareness of the harms of alcohol and substance misuse.

This is, of course, utter claptrap. Of course we know it's bad for us, it's just that we're happy with the trade-off implied by hedonism. We're no more victims of advertising than smokers or kids wanting sweets. If not drinking now means we live longer - maybe - can we be so sure that extra bit of life will be a pleasure too? Or will it be an uncomfortable, perhaps painful, few months dribbling slowly to death in a nursing home? Us boomers look around at our friends and neighbours and decide to live for now rather than for some possible future.

There's another aspect of this claptrap. All this high octane living doesn't seem to be killing us off (rock stars aside and even there most aren't dropping dead). The pubs are filled with people in their 60s and 70s living happy and fulfilling lives. Look down the seats on your holiday flight and check out all those boomers spending the kids inheritance on cooking themselves in the Spanish sun (skin cancer - bring it on) and meandering round Florence, Prague and Madrid lapping up the culture (plus the food and wine, of course).

For the po-faced, narrow-minded, judgemental folk at the Church of Public Health all this won't do at all. We (the Boomers that is) need to be stopped because we're killing ourselves and worse still, we're setting a bad example to the young. Think of the children! So they agitate for advertising bans, for higher taxes, for distribution controls, for watering down the beer, and for draconian licensing regulations. Only when we've been nudged with a large baseball bat into cutting down our boozing will these zealots be happy.

The problem is that we aren't budging. Why the hell should we forgo pleasure now for the sake of an uncertain future. We don't want to die but we do at least recognise that this is going to happen, that we aren't going to live forever. So in the diminishing years left to us, why shouldn't we drink and eat for pleasure? Don't expect us to limit our drinking to a couple of pints on a night out and our eating to a fat-free, salt-free, sugar-free, meat-free, taste-free, overcooked pap. We're not going to do this and the more you nanny us the louder we'll get and the ruder we'll get about the fussbucketry of public health. If they want to live a stressful, dull life without pleasure that's fine by me but, for the rest of us, hedonism rocks. We started the great binge and boy do we intend to finish it!

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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In which alcohol researchers discover something called a "party" - and want it stopped

Intrepid Alcohol Researcher learn about the Party

John Holmes the neo-puritan who runs the Alcohol Research Group at the University of Sheffield has stepped away from his usual reliance on using computer modelling as his source or evidence to look at actual human behaviour. And our intrepid researcher approaches this study with the arrogance of a 1950s social anthropologist describing the marriage practice of some previously unknown jungle tribe.

However, we also see occasions that are commonplace but attract less attention from policy makers and public health advocates. For example, 14% of drinking occasions involved domestic gatherings of family and friends, perhaps at house parties and dinner parties or to watch the football. On average people drank the equivalent of a bottle of wine or four pints of beer on these occasions and, in many cases, they consumed more than this. Yet such occasions are rarely discussed when identifying the kinds of drinking problems that need to be tackled.

The discovery that people have parties must have been pretty shocking really. Who knew? And what a delightfully neo-puritan statement concludes Holmes' discovery of the party - "...identifying the kinds of drinking problems that need to be tackled". You and your friends and family chilling round a barbeque (assuming we actually get some sunshine), celebrating a new job or maybe just getting together to share a drink and have a laugh - these events, my friends, are "drinking problems that need to be tackled".

Holmes goes on to fret a little more. You see the neo-puritan fussbuckets at Sheffield have been the main advocates of minimum unit pricing as a means of stopping people (in particular poor people) from drinking. This advocacy was almost entirely based on the torturing of Holmes' computer model plus some very creative interpretations of price elasticity. At no point did the Sheffield researchers ever consider actual drinking behaviour by real people. And now, having seen how real people consume alcohol, the conclusion is that something else must be done to stop all this partying, pleasure and drunkenness:

Introducing a minimum price for alcohol and providing drinking guidelines for those deemed lower risk might reduce habitual alcohol consumption, but these policies might do less to tackle heavy drinking where getting intoxicated and letting the hair down is the main motivation and where the location, company and timing are all conducive to sidelining concerns about price and long-term health.

You see the problem don't you. When we get in a few bottles, cook up a big chilli and invite folk round to celebrate a new job, a big win or a graduation, we're not thinking about our health or how much all that lovely booze is costing. We're just planning on having a damned good night and waking up in the morning with a hangover. This is, of course, exactly how parties work - unless of course, you're working in an Alcohol Research Group where, presumably, celebrations are more muted featuring only tap water and decaffeinated coffee.

The sad thing is that, now these researchers have discovered that people like to have a drink at parties, they'll be working overtime to develop 'strategies' intended to stop this happening. We'll get the usual finger wagging fussbucketry - ad bans, turgid lectures about drink, more licensing restrictions - and to this will be added new wheezes like limiting how much booze you can buy at a time. Of course what these neo-puritans actually want is prohibition and they plan on introducing it by stealth.

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ONS figures show the British are a sober lot these days

Not that you'd get this impression from the headlines that were run the other day following the (inevitable) revelation that loads of people exceed the new lower drink guidelines from our nanny state:

Around 2.5 million people in Great Britain - 9% of drinkers - consume more than the new weekly recommended limit for alcohol in a single day, latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show.

The 2014 data predates the new limit of 14 units of alcohol per week for men which began in January.

Although habits may start to change, experts say the figures are concerning.

Well this shouldn't be concerning because the truth in all this data is that the British are now a rather sober lot. It's not just the 20% or so of adults who are non-drinkers but facts like this one:

The ONS figures show 58% of people - 28.9 million - drink some alcohol in a typical week.

This figure is lower than a decade ago but has remained stable over the last few years.

Young people are less likely to have consumed alcohol in the last week than those who are older.

So over four in ten Britons don't have a drink in an average week and this figure is lower for the young. Far from the terrible image of binge drinking Britain, we actually live in a country where people have taken that 'drink responsibly, drink in moderation' mantra to heart.

We've known for a while that there are between one and two million people who probably do have a drink problem and probably should do something about their levels of consumption. Add to this people who on one night or another exceed 14 units - probably not to do so again for weeks or even months (remmber that wedding party don't you?) - and you've got your 2.5 million. For context - and remember that a good number, perhaps most, of these people aren't people with a drink problem - this is less than 5% of the adult population.

What we have is national policy directed at the 30 million or so drinkers rather than at fewer than 2 million problem drinkers. This is not a public health problem but a problem better dealt with through the places those problem drinkers present - their doctor's surgery, hospital accident and emergency units, police cells and specialist clinics for those that self-diagnose. There is no need for us to squander millions of taxpayers cash on nannying the hell out of the 95% of drinkers who are doing themselves and their friends or family absolutely no harm at all.

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Drunks on a Plane

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Sometimes I wonder about the sanity of some broadsheet journalists. I guess it's probably because they're instructed to churn out a load of clickbait intended to get folk like me going. But this one is utterly ridiculous. The background is that a bunch of drunk idiots caused a plane - presumably filled with a load of other travellers - to land so they could be dumped off and the aircraft continue its journey in peace. Apparently we should be sympathetic:

In these scenarios it’s all too easy for us to blame these men (because that’s what they are) for being ill-disciplined, inconsiderate oiks. “Fine them!” we all cry, obstinately demanding that they are the lowest of the low and should be banned from flying for life.

Instead of that, let’s track their journey through the airport.

They arrive, let’s say at 7am ahead of their 9am flight. Having passed through customs they’re met with wall-to-wall booze, cigarettes and aftershave – all the hallmarks of a true lad.

In the duty-free hall is a bar, offering free samples of rums, vodka, whisky… the list goes on. They could have headed towards the lounge having already had a fair few shots. But oh, look! The airport bar is open. No other bar in the land is allowed to open at this time, but at the airport for some reason that’s OK.

You see these men are so infantilised by modern society that it's impossible for them to pass an open bar without having a drink. This is despite the ample evidence to the contrary - millions of people flying all over the world without getting drunk and causing trouble on planes.

Now it's true that bars at airports are open more-or-less all the time but most of us manage to make it to the plane without getting lashed. And quite a few people - for reasons I am unable to fathom - seem to have an "I'm going on holiday" switch in their heads that makes them quite happy to drink pints of lager or a large glass of wine at 7am. But these people mostly manage not to get drunk, loud or violent as a result. Let's say that there were 150 or so passengers on that disrupted flight - people who didn't pay good money to experience drunk, naked idiots running about the plane. Those people were inconvenienced - they'd people waiting for them on arrival, connections to resorts perhaps even trains to catch. If there's some sympathy it should be directed to those people not the prats who spoiled their journey.

All but a few passengers behave properly - they might drink but they don't get so drunk they think stripping off on a scheduled flight a good idea. What this Chris Hemmings chap (in between reliving his frankly pathetic undergraduate drinking escapades) misses is that these idiots had a choice - they could have chosen to have a drink in the airport, get on the plane, fly to Bratislava and then go party. To suggest that the fault lies with airport bars, cheap flights and duty free is quite wrong. It's the Heinz Kiosk approach - "we are all guilty" - rather than the truth, which is that nobody else at all is responsible for the behaviour of these drunks.

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Quote of the day - on the consequence of political decisions

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From the incomparable Dick Puddlecote:

My personal favourite was a story of a politician who was offered a drink late at night and chose a single malt. His companion went to the bar but was told he couldn't be served that particular drink because it counted as a shot and the law said they were illegal after midnight in order to tackle binge-drinking. "What a stupid law that is!", raged the politician, to which his friend replied, "yes, but you voted for it".

Thus we are reminded that firstly many politicians are stupid and, secondly, that Australia has some of the most controlling, nannying and downright offensive government in what we still call the free world.

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Why the new drink limits are not just wrong but stupid

All set to break public health boozing guidelines

The government, in the form of the shockingly disingenuous Chief Medical Officer, has announced new guidelines on 'safe limits' for drinking alcohol.

...the new rules now state that both men and women should drink no more than 14 units over the course of three days or more. This is the equivalent of a bottle and a half of wine over the course of a week.

The rules also say that it's best not to "save up units" and drink them all in one go and to make sure you have alcohol-free days.

I don't intend to dwell on how these new guidelines are based on misleading (which is being kind) presentation of science - suffice it to say there's a pretty comprehensive debunking of the basis for the CMO's new guidelines from Chris Snowden.

Instead, I'm going to tell you why the new guidance is stupid. Utterly stupid. It's not just that these new guidelines won't change anything except for a few more very moderate or occasional drinkers to tip over into teetotallerhood and for the nannying fussbuckets to have a new a very big figure of 'hazardous' drinking to beat us up with. No it's that nearly everyone is going to completely ignore the guidance because they think it's a load of nonsense.

A bit like this - from piss take website UlsterFry:

The entire population of Northern Ireland fully intends to ignore the new, more stringent, alcohol limits unveiled by the Department of Health today, a survey made up by The Ulster Fry has revealed.

According to the new guidelines both men and women should limit themselves to 14 units a week, spread over at least three sessions. For the uninitiated, 14 units is the equivalent of not very many pints of beer, a Sunday afternoon amount of wine or a thimbleful of Buckfast.

However most people we spoke to weren’t too worried about the changes. “It seems men are limited to the same as women,” commented Harry Snatter, a 34 year draught excluder from Lurgan. “That’s fine with me, as my missus drinks like a bastard, in fact I’ll probably have to start drinking through the week to keep up with her.”

Every pub, bar, cafe and occasional drinking establishment will contain someone who will tell you - for absolute free - that the guidelines are "complete bollocks from a bunch of nannies". And trust me on this one, people won't believe the slightly unhealthy looking woman on the telly promoting the new abstemious guidance and will believe the bloke in the public bar. Mostly because the bloke in the bar is believable when he says "it probably not wise to get blasted every night -pace yourselves" whereas the crabby nanny on the box telling you that more than two sips of cooking sherry will give you breast cancer - even if you're a fella - is about as believable as Leeds United getting promoted in 2016.

As with everything about public health, it's enthusiasts kill successful programmes. UK alcohol consumption has been falling for a decade and while this doesn't seem to feed through to figures on alcohol harm (raising a doubt or two about whether drinking is, in any way, a public health issue - a problem for the whole population) it is testament to how effective the combination of sensible advice and a liberal approach to licensing the juice has been. Now, with this new temperance agenda - "risks from alcohol start from any level of regular drinking" as the BBC puts it - the public health people have guaranteed that their words and advice will get the sort of response usually reserved for opposition centre forwards and referees. Only maybe not quite so polite.

And we'll carry on drinking because the downside risks - a very small chance that we might have a very small increased risk of cancer - are vastly outweighted by the pleasure of drinking. We like alcohol, it has been with us longer than history and our bodies are pretty good at processing it in quantities far higher than the piddlingly small amounts in the new guidelines.

In the end lets recall that Churchill, that paragon of temperance value lived to 90 and the old Queen Mum got past 100:

As Queen Mum she had a steady pattern in her alcohol consumption that she held onto till her dying days in 2002. Major Colin Burgess, the personal attendant to the queen, describes this in the book Behind Palace Doors. According to Burgess Elizabeth would start at noon with a cocktail with 1 part gin and 2 parts Dubonnet, topped off with a slice of lemon or orange. The official name is a Zaza cocktail or a Dubonnet cocktail, but thanks to Elizabeth everyone around the world now calls it the Queen Mother cocktail.

At lunch the Queen Mum would drink red wine and after the meal a glass of port. According to Burgess she also insisted that the people around her joined her. When anyone dared to ask for water, Elizabeth would ask incredulously: “How can you not have wine with your meal?” At 6 in the afternoon it was what the Queen Mother would call ‘Magic Hour’ and she had herself a martini. And at dinner she would drink 2 glasses of Veuve Cliquot, a pink champagne. 

While trying to hold tight to this drinking schedule, her duties as queen and later Queen Mother didn’t always allow it. That’s why Elizabeth instructed her staff to hide bottles of gin in hatboxes when she was on the road, so she could have a secret sip whenever she wanted. As the Queen Mum herself once said: “I couldn’t get through all my engagements without a little something.”

That sounds about right! Up yours fussbuckets. Let's drink to a great 2016.

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Temperance scaremongering about old people drinking

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Accompanied by a stock photograph of a grey-haired couple with a glass of wine, the latest piece of anti-booze scaremongering has hit the news:

New figures show that dangerously high levels of alcohol consumption by baby boomers are leading to growing numbers of over-65s being hospitalised, adding to pressures on the NHS. “The number of older people drinking unsafely and unhealthily is rising at an alarming rate, putting their health at risk and further strain on NHS services,” said Dr Tony Rao, Britain’s leading expert on older people’s drinking.

It seems that boozed-up oldies are swamping the hospitals as they succumb to something called by the doctors "mental and behavioural disorders related to alcohol use". It's not clear what exactly these mental and behavioural disorders are (or indeed whether they are directly related to alcohol or merely exacerbated by drinking). Dr Rao though has seen a huge increase in patients at his clinics:

“Ten years ago I would have been treating no more than three people at any one time for alcohol-related brain damage. Now there are at least 10 patients with that in the service I work in.”

Yes folks, this entire story is about ten people in South London who have Korsakoff Syndrome - hardly a problem that is going to 'bankrupt' the NHS. And we don't even know whether Dr Rao's ten patients are over 65 and whether what they have is Korsakoff Syndrome or some other form of alcohol induced brain damage. The truth here - and this is hinted at in the article - is that the patients admitted to hospital for these 'mental and behavioural disorders' are people with a long history of heavy drinking. This isn't about that couple in the picture having a glass of wine with dinner but about people we might call 'serious drinkers'.

And all this ignores the well-established evidence showing a link between moderate alcohol consumption and reduced incidence of dementia:

The inverse relationship between moderate wine drinking and incident dementia was explained neither by known predictors of dementia nor by medical, psychological or socio-familial factors. These results were confirmed from data of the Rotterdam study. Light-to-moderate drinking (one to three drinks per day) was significantly associated with a lower risk of any dementia (hazard ratio 0.58 [95% CI 0.38-0.90]) and vascular dementia (hazard ratio 0.29 [0.09-0.93]). No evidence that the relation between alcohol and dementia varied by type of alcoholic beverage was found.

Not that the temperance lobby are interested in this sort of evidence. They prefer to scaremonger.

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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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Gay people drink on a night out, too! Who knew?

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And booze companies craft promotions to appeal to gay drinkers:

THE lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is increasingly being targeted by drinks promotions in bars and clubs and by alcohol companies, according to new research.

Concerns were raised that alcohol was found to be a central part of a night out on the commercial scene for LGBT people, with fears that this is being exploited by drinks manufacturers.

I am deeply shocked that drinks companies are targeting promotions towards a section of the adult population. How dare they.

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Misusing the idea of 'evidence' - the case of alcohol policy

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It's Alcohol Awareness Week when all the fussbuckets issue tutting press releases lecturing ordinary folk about how they're drinking too much. These are leapt on by gleeful health reporters keen to fill pages with yet another load of old toss about how what we're eating and drinking is leading us to an early grave.

So we shouldn't be surprised if two of the UK's leading centres of fussbucketry - Sterling and Sheffield Universities - have published a new report about alcohol policy. The premise of the report is this:

Alcohol policies across the four UK nations vary widely in the extent to which they are grounded in scientific evidence, with political considerations appearing to have significant bearing

Awful, I think you'll agree, awful. How very dare politicians take account of "political considerations" such as how many jobs, businesses, exports and so forth link to the drinks industry.

What concerns me here is what these people consider to be evidence. And the truth here is that we're not talking about evidence at all but rather about a report setting out a series of policy proposals loosely based on a selective interpretation of the "evidence" and wholly wedded to the lie that alcohol harm is a "whole population" problem. In simple terms the "research" simply castigates the UK government for failing to do what the researchers said the government should do - concluding their press release with a quotation accusing the government of 'ideology' which is a bit rich considering that their anti-booze position is deeply ideological.

The 'evidence' presented isn't evidence at all - not surprising since these are the sort of researchers who ignore facts like a nearly 20% decline in alcohol consumption and a similar decline in linked issues like violent crime. Nor do these researchers recognise the enormous - and consistent - body of evidence showing that moderate drinking, far from being remotely harmful, is actually healthy (indeed healthier than abstinence).

The most egregious element of this 'evidence' is that our researchers believe that engaging in 'partnerships with the alcohol industry' is a terrible sin because that industry doesn't support the researchers temperance and prohibitionist position.

It really is time we told these supposed 'scientists' to end their evidence-light, ideological attack on drinking. An attack based on prejudice and ignorance rather than any actual facts about drinking. They are wrong about pricing, wrong about marketing and advertising, wrong about the costs and benefits of alcohol to the UK, wrong about children and drinking, and wrong about the level of alcohol-related harm. And by wrong I mean they have no evidence to support their position not just that I disagree with them.

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Vegemite - a reminder (if you needed one) that prohibition doesn't work

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OK it's Australia, home to some of the world's most intrusive fussbucketry but it's a lesson:

Australia’s government says Vegemite sales should be limited in some communities to prevent the yeast-based spread being used to make home-made alcohol.

Nigel Scullion, the indigenous affairs minister, said the spread – which is considered something of a national culinary staple – was a "precursor to misery" in communities suffering from alcohol abuse.

He said he was not proposing a ban but wanted to restrict excessive sales of high-yeast products such as Vegemite in “dry” communities – typically remote Aboriginal townships where alcohol sales are banned.

“Addiction of any type is a concern but communities, especially where alcohol is banned, must work to ensure home brewing of this type does not occur,” he said.

See what's happened here? These 'dry' communities (apparently Aussie white people think Aboriginal drink problems relate to some natural predisposition not to 200 years of oppression) do what dry communities always do - they make their own booze. And, as we all know, alcohol is very easy to make.

You see, prohibition doesn't work.

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Journalists and maths - things that don't really mix. The case of the boozy MPs.

It's from the Sun so all the gory details (doubtless given the source more of the former than the latter) are behind Rupert's paywall. However the point is this:

BOOZY MPs have sparked a fierce backlash from campaigners by splashing out £11,000 in just one week in Parliament’s bars.

Terrible. All these MPs clogging up bars, sloshing back copious quantities of booze while they should be running the country (or something like that). The problem here is shown by some basic maths. There are 650 MPs which means that, to spend £11,000 in a week, the average MP spent £16.92 - just £2.42 per day. A bear in mind that there are a load of other folk who can buy beer in the House of Commons. So MPs are drinking less than a pint of beer on average (the price list is here - the cheapest beer is £2.70 for a pint) and people are having a go at them?

The 'campaigners' in question appear to be folk working for Alcohol Concern - or so it seems. Quoted in the Daily Express, Jackie Ballard (a former Liberal Democrat MP and professional nannying fussbucket) the boss of Alcohol Concern showcased another lie to make a lame point:

Jackie Ballard, head of Alcohol Concern, said: "At a time when alcohol is causing grief to individuals and costing our society £21billion a year, Parliament should be leading by example."

Seems to me that Parliament is absolutely setting an example - the level of consumption is well within the guidelines of the health fanatics and reveals that, far from being a bunch of drunks, MPs are avoiding boozing on the job. The idea that spending an average of £6.62 on the first day back represents partying "hard into night following election gains" seems to be stretching the point given that this won't even buy half a bottle of the House's house sauvignon.

This is just another example of prohibitionist campaigners taking advantage of the seeming inability of journalists to grasp simple maths. With the result that we get shock horror headlines over takings that would represent a pretty lousy night for a typical city centre boozer.

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Booze, early death and bad reporting

My local paper, the Telegraph & Argus is generally pretty good but every now and then - especially on health matters - it produces some utterly shocking journalism. And today on the subject of early death it produced a corker.

The writer, Rob Lowson presents a more-or-less straightforward report on the last data from the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) on the matter of premature death. The HSCIC has totted up the gap between the age people die and the "potential" life expectancy - these figures show that Bradford is bottom of the pile in Yorkshire.

For once I'm not going to set off on a rant explaining how the age at which people are dying now is not a very good guide to the age at which people who are living will die. This should be utterly obvious to anyone looking at this data, so obvious that I can only assume that it suits the purposes of public health folk to pretend that current mortality rates are somehow an indicator of future mortality rates (or indeed a thing they call "health inequality").

Instead let's look at Rob's words - he explains the data and how it's calculated, explains the conditions that contribute (coronary heart disease, respiratory problems, cancers) and quotes - at some length - Bradford Council's Director of Public Health who talks about what the Council is doing and urges a degree of personal responsibility:

"Our campaigns also highlight the importance of individuals taking responsibility for their own health by making positive lifestyle choices like exercising regularly, drinking in moderation, eating a healthy diet, and stopping smoking."

Nothing here at all that suggests those lifestyle choices are the reason for the gap - indeed the Council's approach is to stress reducing poverty and improving environmental conditions such as warmer homes and cleaner air. It's all pretty fair and concludes with something of a success story - the reduction in rates of infant mortality in Bradford (which were among the UK's highest and merited the focus of public health efforts).

Given all this, I have no idea why the newspaper chose to illustrate the article with a photograph of a beer engine and a couple of guys drinking pints. A photograph with the caption - wholly unrelated to the article - "excessive drinking is one factor in Bradford's high early death rate". A bald statement based on no evidence and almost certainly not the main - or even a significant - problem. Bradford has one of the highest rates of abstention in the UK (23% of adults) and has rates of heavy drinking significantly below the English average (6.24% as compared to 6.75%). Just to complete the picture the city also has lower rates of alcohol-related violent crime that the English average.

It is lazy, sloppy newspaper reporting to pick on one factor - one unimportant factor - to illustrate a balanced report on Bradford's mortality statistics. And even worse to do so by picking on beer served in a public house as the source of the problem.

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