Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, steps down in May. For a retirement home he might consider the town of Rawtenstall, Lancashire, which boasts the UK's only surviving temperance bar. Mr Fitzpatrick's, on Bank Street, would be the ideal place for Sir Liam to meet Kevin Barron, chair of the health select committee, and Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, to sip pints of blackberry and raisin cordial and consider cures for the nation's drinking problem.
This temperance triumvirate is leading the latest charge against the evil drink. Top of their agenda is a minimum price for alcohol – 50p a unit is the proposal – and a reversal of the liberalisation of pub opening hours that took place in 2003. The report of Barron's committee, published today, will push both these demands.
The new temperance leaders point to the £2.7bn cost to the NHS, as well as the impact of drinking on family relationships, public order, police resources and the criminal justice system. Nobody can deny that there are economic and social costs associated with alcohol consumption. Most assaults – including domestic ones – involve alcohol, and the divorce risk doubles in marriages where one partner has a drink problem. Add to this a million A&E visits and 500 annual road deaths and you might begin to wonder if the US prohibitionists had a point.
But there is another side to the ledger. Alcohol brings significant benefits. The economic ones are most obvious. In the UK, taxes on alcohol and the sector provide £15bn to the exchequer (far more than the costs to the NHS). The hospitality industry employs 650,000 people. There are personal and social benefits too, although it is by definition difficult to put a numerical value on them: how much is a glass of champagne at a wedding worth, or a few pints down the pub with your friends?
I recently asked a group of about 30 public health officials – all deeply concerned about "booze Britain" – whether, if they could, they would wave a magic wand and remove alcohol from existence. Four raised their hands. Alcohol is a longstanding ingredient of human societies. Our Lord didn't turn the water at Cana into refreshing carrot juice.
The new temperance movement bears some of the hallmarks of previous moral panics, in particular a strong revulsion at the sight of women drinking; a deep concern about the "poor" or "working class" over-indulging; and an appeal to the social rights of non-drinkers not to be affected by the drinking classes.
The minimum pricing approach would be deeply regressive. With a floor of 50p a unit, most bottles of wine would by law have to cost at least £4.50. To many Guardian readers this might not sound too bad: but more than half the wine bottles sold in the UK cost less than £4. The poorest group in society – the bottom 10% of the income distribution – spends just £5 a week on alcohol to take home, a figure that would rise substantially under Sir Liam's plans.
Meanwhile, the richest would see little or no change, since their £28 weekly drinks bill is made up of purchases well above the proposed minimum per-unit price. The bottles of Berry Brothers Bordeaux enjoyed by the affluent are safe. It is Tesco's Berberana, currently on sale at £3.32 a bottle, which would be priced beyond the budget of many households. The deals on beer offered by many supermarkets would disappear, seriously hitting low-income households. In this way a war against booze quickly becomes a war against the poor.
The 19th-century temperance movement was defeated by an alliance of liberals and the working class, and it looks like a repeat performance might be required. A prohibition bill was squashed in the Commons in 1859, the year in which John Stuart Mill in On Liberty savaged the "beer house purism" of the religiously inspired anti-alcohol lobby. Mill, not exactly a binge-drinker himself, recognised the costs of alcohol in terms of some disorder and lessened security, but thought that these were costs "which society can afford to bear, for the sake of the greater good of human freedom".
From a public health point of view, alcohol is a tricky case, because it is both a social good and a social bad. Consumption of drink is a question of balance. In a free society, this balance ought to be struck by individuals rather than the state.
