Minimum pricing

In the life of every alcoholic, a moment arrives when he or she can no longer ignore the terrible costs of their addiction, and they quietly and sadly concede that they cannot go on any more with the way things are.

This appears to be the case with alcoholic societies, and the Prime Minister himself in recent weeks has conceded that even though his normal instincts are to let brewing giants, pub chains and supermarkets run riot, the scale of Britain's drinking problem is so great that, as Edward VIII once put it, 'something must be done'.

That something has manifested itself in a call for minimum alcohol pricing, which could come to 50p per unit, substantially increasing the cost of alcohol, which in real terms is the cheapest it has been since records began.

The addiction, illness, misery, violence and chaos that this tsunami of discounted alcohol has brought with it is almost beyond counting, but perhaps this one fact will shed a little light on the problems Britain now faces; nurseries in Wales are now being given guidance on how best to deal with young children born with foetal alcohol syndrome, a debilitating and life long condition that affects children physically emotionally and mentally. The cost to our shared environment, to our communities, to our NHS, to our friends and families has all been one which we seem to have been willing to bear as global alcohol brands accumulate vast profits and pay nothing towards cleaning up their messes, but now the cost will be borne by a generation of children too.

If the nearby steel mill was belching out poisonous fumes and polluting our neighbourhoods, crippling children with contaminated water or reducing life expectancy amongst teenagers, an environmental movement would evolve to challenge the owners and make the plant safe. This has happened on numerous occasions, and now there is the beginning of a similar sort of movement, one which the Prime Minister is savvy enough to recognise and court.

Instead of clipping the wings of a polluting steel mill, however, socially polluting alcohol retailers who privatise their profits but socialise their costs must now be forced by law to accept some responsibility for the level of social destruction wrought by alcohol.
This is but half the story however. If it were simply a question of taxing alcohol and changing sales practices, we could leave the task to an army of faceless Whitehall Mandarins and forget all about it. But it isn't, and we can't.

What has led us to this place? We must now earnestly ask ourselves, our families and our neighbours this question. How did we get to a point where, in the words of MP Sarah Wollaston:

"About 13 young people will die this week as a result of alcohol, and about 650 this year. Nearly a quarter of all deaths of young people aged between 15 and 24 are caused by alcohol. That is two every day - far more than are killed by knife crime or cancer..."

Minimum pricing is certainly a step in the right direction, but only a first step, just as any alcoholic must initially stop drinking in order to start getting well, it is but the very beginning of the journey and without understanding the personal pain and sorrow that led to addiction, relapse is highly likely. We must now examine our culture, one that celebrates alcohol and alcoholism, that cheers on George Best, Keith Moon, Oliver Reed and Paul Gascoigne as irreverent rebels, that interprets the death of Amy Winehouse as the result of 'tortured genius' and rewards X Factor drunks and addicts by more publicity to satisfy our prurience.

We must examine the hopelessness that exists in our society from top to bottom, that presents drinking as an alternative to living, and that has raised drunkenness to the level of a virtue. We must also examine the narcissism and ego fuelled self absorption that we have now all been forced to recognise as legitimate behaviour, and which results in immense personal and social harm.

It has long been understood that societies that are fuelled by such things inevitably weaken or implode, so long after the Government's new pricing rules come into effect, we must, as a matter of absolute necessity, be engaging in a national debate about who we are and why we drink.