Speech given by Josie Appleton to alcohol policy-makers, at Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum Keynote Seminar: Alcohol 2010 – public health, policy and personal responsibility, 8 July 2010.
As a civil liberties campaigner, I have a real concern about the trajectory of current drinking policy, because I think that what's been lost is an idea that there are some areas of people’s lives which is really not the business of Government to dictate or to intervene in. Now there are regulations on not only the price of drinks, but suggested regulations on the names of cocktails, with no suggestive cocktail names or any references to ‘slammers’ or ‘shooters’. There is regulation of the receptacle in which drinks are carried, and test tubes only recently escaped being banned recently. There is regulation of drinking standing up in Oldham and other places; and regulation on drinks queues, with signage and lines showing people how to queue at the pub. There is regulation on drinking in public, so drinking is banned on the Tube, and there are proposed bans on public transport. There are also many cases of people having their alcohol confiscated in parks and beaches. There is regulation of drinks offers, with no free drinks for the ladies, no two for one.
I really think that the Government is not the freeholder of our bodies, and that there is a right for people to carry out behaviour which may be thought to be unwise, unhealthy or uncouth by others. There is an essential question of liberty and autonomy that has to be re‐valued in alcohol policy.
Aside from that question, I think that these regulations are completely counterproductive. One thing they do is penalise innocent majority. One of our big Manifesto Club campaigns is against the regulation on drinking in public: people are having their alcohol confiscated when they're just sitting in the park with their friends, or looking at the sea contemplating nature. The police come around, take their beer off them, pour it into the ground. Alcohol regulations are being used across social life, and very much penalising innocent people who are just relaxing in public space.
The second reason why these regulations are ineffectual is because people drink to get off their face for various complex reasons, which are not to do with actually not knowing how many units are in the drink, or the fact that they've just seen an advert. It's to do with not liking your life, and problem drinking actually occurs in communities where you have social breakdown, or extreme hopelessness, so for example on some Native American or Aboriginal territories.
In as much as there is a new kind of youth drinking problem, I think that this is really the result of a breakdown of adult socialisation of young people. This is occurring across Europe as the previous speaker said, but the difference is that in Europe they realise this reflects a deeper problem. So in France for example, there's a new phenomena of young people meeting up on Facebook and having big parties in public space ‐ but in public discussion there, they realised this phenomenon is about something deeper. So commentators were saying that young people are trying to show they exist, or is it that they're trying to lose themselves ‐ but across the board there is a sense that this is a social problem, a social issue and you need to discuss it in those terms.
I'd actually go further and say that drinking regulation creates problem drinking. The reason for this is that it breaks down the networks of socialisation that are really important in terms of people drinking in a social context. The thing that regulates drinking, and means you don't drink to get off your face, is because you're drinking in the context of a conversation with friends, a meal, or a concert. It's the social context which regulates drinking and means that actually you don't want to be off your face, because if you're off your face you can't understand the conversation or you can't enjoy the concert.
The main example of regulation creating a problem is with youth drinking. Now, I don't know about members of the panel or Madam Chairman, but I went to a pub first when I was 16. I was a very studious child but that was a normal age to start drinking. The point about that was that you had a period of probation where you drank in an adult environment, and so long as you behaved yourself then that was tolerated, and people turned a blind eye. I also learned to drink on school trips ‐ I played in a music band and I drank with my music teacher and there was an element of teaching young people how to drink in an adult context. I think drinking in the family is very important as well.
The youth drinking problem we have now is because children have been excluded from the adult context of drinking, and essentially are drinking like idiots on park benches. The crackdown on under‐age drinking has actually created the youth drinking problem. America has very wild youth drinking – think of the barbarity of Frat parties – and the result of the harshness of the regulations there, and the fact that you can't drink until you are 21. So really we've created a parallel youth drinking culture, which is asocial, and the kids really behaving in a way that we didn’t.
So my main policy suggestions would be: first, to revalue the personal autonomy in drinks policy, and to recognise that there are certain parts of people’s lives that are their business and not the business of government. Second, to recognise that problem drinking is an expression of deep rooted social problems, and these cannot be dealt with by the regulation of drinks adverts or drinks names. And thirdly, in the case of youth drinking, to let the kids back in the pub. Because I think that the mechanisms of adult socialisation, and of adults actually creating a context of sensible drinking, were far more potent than all this discussion of regulating units or regulating cinema adverts. The more that drinking is integrated into normal life and not excluded as a strange and hyper‐regulated part of life, the more civilised it will be.
