It took Keir Starmer less than a year to dash what few hopes we had of him. There was talk of the Labour Party having more room to manoeuvre on public sector reform than the tentative Tories. It was assumed that the state of the public finances would leave the government with no choice but to tighten its belt. Withdrawing the Winter Fuel Allowance from wealthier pensioners was largely symbolic, but it showed that Sir Keir was prepared to take tough decisions.
All that fell apart upon contact with the first set of local elections. What we have instead is yet more borrowing, much more spending, and the hope that the economy will somehow grow. It is Sunakism with a dash of socialist spite directed at farmers and private schools.
Rishi Sunak left a bunch of displacement policies behind him and the new government has been dutifully pushing them through Parliament, but Starmer can’t rely on this stockpile for much longer. The Pet Abduction Act is already law. The Football Governance Bill has had its third reading. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill is in the House of Lords. There is a danger that the well of headline-grabbing policies that are cheap to implement but ultimately futile runs dry.
And so Labour’s policy wonks have had a pow-wow and come up with the idea of banning alcohol advertising. What could be more Sunakian? According to the Telegraph, health officials are “exploring options for partial restrictions to bring [alcohol promotion] closer in line with advertising of unhealthy food”. It is rumoured that a ban of some sort will be part of Wes Streeting’s optimistically titled Ten Year Plan for the NHS next week.
The ban on “unhealthy food” advertising is yet another hangover from the previous government and only exists because Boris Johnson needed to distract people from the way he was handling the pandemic five years ago. The prolonged lockdowns he introduced meant that alcoholics were unable to access face-to-face support and led to a lot of people drinking themselves to death. Alcohol-related death rates remain higher than they were before the pandemic, but this has nothing to do with alcohol advertising (which declined enormously during lockdown because pubs and clubs were shut).
The unpleasant natural experiment of lockdown showed us what works in tackling alcohol harm (treatment) and what doesn’t make any difference (advertising and availability). A mouthpiece for the Methodist-funded Institute of Alcohol Studies claims that alcohol advertising bans are “backed by decades of international evidence” but this is straightforwardly false. Most studies show that advertising influences what brands people buy but has no effect on the overall amount they drink and there is virtually no evidence that they have any impact on alcohol-related deaths. A Cochrane Review concluded that there is “a lack of robust evidence for or against recommending the implementation of alcohol advertising restrictions”.
In short, this is a policy that will cost advertising platforms a lot of money, make the alcohol industry less competitive and achieve nothing for public health, but it will allow politicians to feel virtuous and make it look like Wes Streeting is taking action. It is government for Chris Whitty by Chris Whitty.
It comes a week after a study published in Addiction showed once again how misguided the “public health” approach to alcohol is. Partly inspired by the half-baked theories of the late Geoffrey Rose, the neo-temperance lobby believes that the key to getting heavy drinkers to drink less is to reduce per capita alcohol consumption. They think — and I promise that I am not making this up — that if the average drinker reduces his intake this will somehow encourage binge-drinkers and alcoholics to drink moderately. This is a convenient belief because it helps to justify policies such as minimum pricing and advertising bans which will obviously have no effect on committed drinkers but might nudge the worried well into drinking even less.
The study looked at alcohol duty receipts in the UK and found that alcohol sales have been lower than usual since the pandemic. The authors attribute this, in part, to the “cost of living crisis”. According to public health ideology, the decline in consumption should have led to a decline in alcohol-specific mortality. Instead, it has been accompanied by a marked rise in alcohol-specific mortality, as the authors acknowledge:
…we would expect falling alcohol sales, implying a fall in per capita consumption, to be associated with reductions in alcohol harm. Yet alcohol-specific deaths in the United Kingdom have continued to rise, suggesting that not all groups in the population are drinking less and some may even be drinking more.
They conclude that “further research is needed”, but is it? It is fairly obvious what the problem is. They have started from a false premise. There is no reason to expect a fall in per capita alcohol consumption to lead to a fall in alcohol-related deaths unless the heaviest drinkers are drinking less. That did not happen during the pandemic, it hasn’t happened since, and it certainly won’t happen if the government bans Guinness adverts.
