First they came for smokers. Now the health lobby is after drinkers. But prohibition has its own dangers In her indispensable Watching the English, the Oxford anthropologist Kate Fox explores the connection between the extreme reserve and gross vulgarity which characterise our national life by talking to foreign women about their experience of English men. They were unimpressed, to put it mildly. "Ideally, the English male would rather not issue any definite invitation at all, sexual or social, preferring to achieve his goal though a series of subtle hints and oblique manoeuvres, often so understated as to be almost undetectable," Fox concluded with a shudder. Her interviewees could not tell if men were flirting with them for form's sake or trying to seduce them and complained about "protean behaviour they attribute to shyness, arrogance or repressed homosexuality depending on their degree of exasperation". They did not realise that they were running into the ramparts of ironic detachment which guard the English from commitment as surely as prison walls. The fear of exposing ourselves to rejection, with its concomitant hurt and ridicule, would have led to the extinction of the tribe long ago if booze had not provided a release. No serious person who looks around them believes the media orthodoxy that we have shrugged off our traditional awkwardness and become an "emotionally literate" people. We wouldn't snigger so about sex if we were. Nor would we find that drink offers the only escape from an emotional constipation that prevents us honestly engaging with others. To be English is to experience routine frigidity leavened by binges of debauchery. Or, as Fox says: "The role of alcohol in the passing on of the English DNA should not be underestimated." I wonder how for much longer our rulers will tolerate the national release. Puritanism is as powerful a strain in English culture – and wider British and American culture – as embarrassment. As smokers told you they would, the puritans have now switched their censorious gaze from cigarettes to wine and beer. I can see why journalists failed to recognise that last week's report from the Commons health committee was the first shot in a war against drink. The party leaders had said in advance that they would ignore its findings. The government had already made it clear that it agreed with the supermarkets' arguments that the MPs' plans to stop discount drink sales would hurt successful businesses. It didn't seem much of a story. But the health committee has form and we should not dismiss it. In the 1990s, few thought that its denunciations of smoking would get anywhere, but in the end cigarette advertisements were banished from billboards and smokers banished from the public sphere. More important, the MPs' criticism of the drinks trade represents the consensus view of the NHS, royal colleges and academia – and the medical profession normally gets its way. The puritan's great advantage is that he knows he is right. Indeed in earlier centuries, he was convinced that God had taken the time and trouble to assure him that he was right. His great vice is his fanatical abhorrence of the smallest deviation from virtue, even when it has no ill effect. The growing campaign against drinkers reeks of puritanical rectitude and, much though I would like to, I cannot deny that its supporters have a case. Drinkers harm others to a far larger extent than smokers or the users of illegal drugs. Drunken criminals cause half of all crimes and a fifth of all road deaths. Drink fuels rape, murder and child abuse. Meanwhile, although anti-alcohol campaigners are guilty of over-egging the figures, the growth of alcohol sales from the 1960s to the early 2000s undoubtedly brought increases in suicides, depression, cancer, heart disease and birth defects. So prevalent is alcoholism that sclerosis of the liver, once a disease of old men, is now killing the young. A decade from now, I predict that the BBC, schools and the rest of official society will have learnt the concerns of today's doctors by rote and will preach against the wickedness of alcohol in the prim tone they use to warn against the dangers of smoking. They would be entitled to do so, were not the new temperance movement as afflicted by the same puritan hostility to all sinners as the old campaigns against tobacco and illegal drugs. What do you imagine they say is a "moderate" level of drink? According to the health committee, the answer is six units – that is three pints or one bottle of wine – a week. This is not a misprint. The committee and its associated health professionals do not believe that three pints is a reasonable amount for an evening or a day, but the boundary a "moderate" drinker must not cross from one weekend to the next. From such mean measures, they draw their extraordinary finding that there are 10 million alcoholics in Britain or, as they put it, 10 million who drink above "the recommended level" and their demand that the government campaign against alcohol rather than alcoholism with price rises, sales restrictions and advertising bans. There is no relief from their implacable censoriousness. Nowhere in their report do they manage a word of praise for the conviviality and solidarity the now threatened English pub offers. Not once do they recognise that pubs' informal taboos produce responsible drinking or recommend that the chancellor takes urgent measures to help landlords compete with Tesco by slashing the duty on draught beers. Unwittingly, they are repeating the puritanical mistake of the organisers of the war on drugs. Rather than concentrating on addicts who harm themselves and all around them, the opponents of drugs embraced prohibition and insisted that everyone who used an illegal substance was committing a sin that would lead to their ruin. When vast numbers nevertheless tried cocaine and heroin and lived, the law became a laughing stock. The supreme blunder of modern policing was its determination to punish the otherwise law-abiding. It will soon be repeated with alcohol policy. The English character is not always attractive. The preference for irony over honesty is wearisome, while the occasional escapes from repression into drunkenness justifiably appal foreigners. Worse than both, however, is English puritanism, whose first priority has always been to prevent pleasure rather than relieve pain.The plot was a flop but a revealing one none the less
This new puritanism would drive anyone to drink
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Andrew Rawnsley: Alistair Darling, Harriet Harman and others left Gordon Brown to shiver for a few hours, exposing their anger with him
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