Tag: media shite

| Uncategorised

An open letter to Frank Dobson MP regarding his comments on drinkers

Dear Frank Dobson

I’m just listening to you speak on Decision Time, Radio 4, broadcast on 27th January.

You’ve just claimed – and I’m quoting your words exactly here – that “heavy drinkers cause a vast amount of disorder, get involved in sexual assaults, get involved in accidents and are a major nuisance with loutish behaviour.”

As a heavy drinker myself, I find your comments astonishingly offensive. I have never been involved – even in my youth – in any of the behaviour you describe above, and neither have any of my friends. You are quite clearly implying that if I drink, I am more likely to assault someone violently or sexually.

Your failure to specify ‘some’ or ‘a minority of’ drinkers, or to qualify your claims in any other way, means you are quite clearly claiming that ANYONE who drinks heavily is more likely to carry out such an assault. Having studied NHS and ONS data closely (I’d recommend you do the same) I know for a fact that there is no proof of this. While those who are already prone to sexual or violent assault may well have a drink before carrying out an attack, you are making a grave and slanderous error by implying that alcohol itself makes people more likely to commit such an attack. You are wilfully confusing correlation with causation.

On behalf of myself and the vast majority of drinkers who consume a legal drug that in the vast majority of cases enhances and benefits social interaction rather than damaging it, I demand an apology from you for this appalling slur on our characters, and suggest you check the facts before you open your mouth on this topic again.

As a beer writer, I’ll be copying this email in various channels and urging my many law-abiding, respectable readers to make their feelings known to you in a similar fashion.

Cheers

Pete Brown

Write to Frank at –
Frank Dobson MP
House of Commons
London SW1A 0AARing Frank on –
020 7219 4452 or 020 7219 5840Fax Frank on –
020 7219 6956Email Frank on
patelm@parliament.uk

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

This week’s dose of neopro distortion and lies

Look, I don’t want to keep banging this drum. But the media assault is now a constant bombardment.

Today’s (or rather yesterday’s) villains are the Daily Telegraph, with the story “Children drinking more than adult safe levels, official figures show.” Thanks to Jeff Pickthall for sending me the article and for finding the actual data – he’s very bullish about stuff like this.
Nowhere in the Telegraph article does it give you an actual percentage figure for the number of children who are doing what the headline claims they are doing. By any conceivable standards, that’s just poor reporting. Incompetently poor. So why a professional journalist would do such a thing?
Before we answer that, it’s important to say that the data seems reliable, with one caveat: it’s a survey of 11-15 year olds, and there’s a pretty huge difference between the attitudes, habits and behaviour of an 11 year-old and those of a 15 year-old. Sure, you’ve got to create your data breaks somewhere, but the Telegraph subhead about “Children as young as eleven are drinking two bottles of wine a week” is pretty disingenuous when you don’t have a breakdown of ages within the group. If 63% of all 11-15 year olds have tried alcohol at some point in their lives, I’m guessing that figure is several times higher for 15 year olds than for 11 year olds. You simply cannot draw the conclusion from the data available that any child as young as eleven is drinking as much as the Telegraph claims. They may well be. But the data as it’s presented does NOT say that they are.
(By the way – if it seems tedious that I keep referring to 11-15 year olds, it’s because that’s the age group of the survey – there’s quite a difference between ‘children’ – which is what the Telegraph are claiming the story is – and 11-15 year olds – the oldest third of all children.)
But whatever, it’s still all under-age drinking, right? Which is of course wrong (because Liam Donaldson said so, without any research or data to back up his personal belief).
So what does the “official data” referred to by the Telegraph actually say? Unsurprisingly, even a cursory look suggests quite a different picture from the one the newspaper paints:
  • The percentage of 11-15 year olds who have ever drunk FELL from 55% in 2006 to 52% in 2008
  • The percentage of 11-15 year-olds who have drunk in the last week FELL from 21% in 2006 to 18% in 2008
  • The AVERAGE alcohol consumption for 11-15 year olds who have drunk alcohol is between 13 and 16 units – so not higher than safe limits for adults at all then. And as that’s an average of 11-15 year olds who have ever drunk (52%), simple maths tells you that the average for ALL 11-15 year olds must be half that – around 7-8 units.
  • Why focus on the North East? Because that’s the region where 11-15 year olds have drunk more than anywhere else. It’s not typical of the country as a whole. 63% of 11-15 year olds have drunk alcohol there, compared with only 39% in London.
  • The Telegraph correctly reports that ‘more than one in four’ 11-15 year olds in the North East have drunk in the last week. It doesn’t report that in London, this figure is only 12%. Everywhere else, it’s between the two.
  • In terms of average weekly consumption, girls marginally exceed the safe limit for women in five out of nine regions, by an amount that is within the standard margin of error quoted by statisticians. For example, in West Midlands girls drink an average of 14.2 units a week, with a standard range of error of 1.27, meaning they could be as much as 15.9 or as little as 12.5.
  • In no area of the country do boys drink an average of more than 21 units – the recommended limit for men. The Telegraph headline is therefore factually inaccurate on yet another count. In the body of the article it states where teenage girls drink too much. It doesn’t mention the figures for teenage boys because they don’t fit with the story the newspaper is fabricating – so let me say once again, IN NO REGION OF THE COUNTRY ARE 11-15 YEAR OLD BOYS DRINKING MORE THAN THE ‘SAFE’ LIMITS FOR ADULT MEN.

The headline “Children drinking more than adult safe levels” clearly suggests that the typical or average child is doing so. The “official data” emphatically shows that this is NOT the case, and also shows – like all other recent data on the subject – that under-age drinking is declining, something the Telegraph does not see fit to mention at all.

Here is a serious and incredibly well-respected newspaper deliberately distorting NHS data to create a story that is significantly more alarming than the truth. The sub-editors have taken a story the journalist has already distorted, and written a headline and sub-head that is simply not true on several counts.
Why? Do they have their own agenda? Or are they just resorting to cheap, tabloid-style sensationalism? Anyone know?

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

The Great Dentist’s Chair Hunt – Results

Last week I asked for evidence of the infamous ‘dentist’s chair’ promotion – where one person lies back in a chair while others pour spirits down their necks.

It was quoted in every newspaper and radio news report on the government’s introduction of a mandatory code for pubs as being typical of the kind of binge drinking promotion that needs to be stamped out. I’ve never seen one, and asked if anyone else had spotted one in a UK licensed premises over the last ten years.
We’ve managed to identify that this activity definitely does happen in Sam Jacks in Newcastle (it just had to be Newcastle, didn’t it?). Thanks to Beer Nut and Stringers Beer.
But so far, we’ve failed to find evidence of it happening in more than one of Britain’s 105,000 on-licensed pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants.
And then, yesterday, I received an e-mail from someone who works for one of the UK’s largest circulation national newspapers. For obvious reasons I can’t reveal that person’s identity. But what they have to say speaks volumes about the media and neo-prohibitionism:

“I was asked to find images showing the aforementioned chair for our paper last week. One of the picture researchers spent a couple of hours on the case without finding one single picture of this occurring anywhere in the world, never mind Britain. That search included 13 or 14 commercial picture agencies handling millions of stock images which, I think, shows that this particular form of drinking – disregarding one event involving England footballers almost 15 years ago – is non-existent.”
It’s good to know that even among the people who are compelled to spread the myth of ‘soaring’ binge drinking, there are those who realise what a crock of horseshit this whole media-generated moral panic really is.

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

The Great Dentist’s Chair Hunt

BLTP raises an interesting point on my last post:

“Just been listening to Today and they mentioned “dentist chair” binge drinking, has anyone ever seen one of these? The famous (in 1996) Gazza incident happened abroad didn’t it? And yet this is talked about as if it’s daily widespread.”
I’ve never seen one. I just did a Google image search and can’t find a single picture of one.
If anyone can send me documentary proof of such a promotion happening anywhere in the UK in the last ten years, you get a free copy of my book and a copy of the HSC Report.

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

More hilarity with statistics

So according to our neoprohibitionist friends at BBC news, the Scots drink 46 bottles of vodka a year, each.

It’s a shocking statistic – an average of almost a bottle of vodka a week for every single person aged over 18. But is it as bad as it sounds?
I’ve checked the calculation – 12 litres of pure alcohol per person – the level of sales from which this figure is derived = 40 x 750ml bottles of alcohol at 40% – not 46 bottles then, but 40. They also claim this is the equivalent of 537 pints of beer or 130 bottles of wine. I did my own calculation based on 4% beer and 12.5% wine and got the same figure, so I’m obviously doing my calculations the same way they are. I checked all leading brands of vodka and they’re 40% ABV. So the people working out this figure are either pretending vodka is less strong than we all think it is, in order to deliberately bump up the number of bottles, or they’ve got their sums wrong. If they’re going to alarm us like this, you’d think they could at least get their fucking maths right.
40 bottles a year still sounds like a lot though. And this time, I have no figures to contradict what’s being said here, but let’s look at it more closely from a few different angles:
  • If it was as bad as it is being made to sound, Scotland wouldn’t function as a country. It gives the impression that every adult is a harmful drinker. And while Scotland does have issues with drink, the country is not collapsing.
  • The BBC report claims that this figure is the equivalent to every adult drinking an average of 26 units of alcohol a week. Suddenly, that doesn’t sound quite as bad. But I checked this calculation too – 40 x 750ml bottles of 40% ABV liquid = a round 1200 units of alcohol a year. Divided by 52 weeks, that actually comes to 23.1 units a week – not 26 as is claimed in the piece. The 537 pints of 4% beer gives you an average of 23.5 units a week, and the 130 bottles of 12.5% wine gives you a weekly 23.25. So once again, the people making the calculations can’t use a fucking calculator properly. An average of 23.1 units a week for every adult? OK, it’s still over government guidelines, but not by much. As an average it does mean many people a drinking quite a bit more than they should, but not close to harmful levels. Oh and hang on…
  • These figures are based on alcohol sold in Scotland – just over 50 million litres last year. What is Scotland famous for? Vodka? No, whisky. So why is the headline about vodka? Why does it not say ‘Scots drink 40 bottles of whisky each every year’? Why not? Because if it were, you might make the link between alcohol sales in Scotland and tourism. Tourism is worth £4.2 billion to the Scottish economy, employing 8% of the total workforce. And whisky is a massive part of that. One million foreign tourists visit Scotch whisky distilleries every year, spending a total of £25 million – and rising (source: ScotlandWhisky). I can’t make the calculations, but I’m betting a big chunk of that £25 million is spent on bottles of whisky. And that’s just what these tourists are spending on distillery tours – what else are they spending in bars, pubs and restaurants on alcohol, while on their holidays? And total annual tourist numbers to Scotland come in at 2.5 million – and rising (source: Scottish government). It’s incredible that two in five tourists come to Scotland to visit distilleries, but a huge chunk of those who don’t visit distilleries still drink. Whatever their total consumption it’s going to account for a sizeable chunk of the 50 million litres of pure alcohol sold in Scotland every year. But every single dram those 2.5 million tourists drink, every single bottle the 1 million distillery visitors buy at the end of their tours, is being included in the figure for what the indigenous Scottish population puts away. In the piece, rising alcohol consumption in Scotland is blamed on cheap prices – the fact that tourism is increasing year on year is not considered.

So, another non-story then.

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

CAMRA and the neo-prohibitionists

A few of you have asked me where CAMRA is in the whole battle against the neo-prohibitionists, and whether they have issued any response to the HSC report.

So yesterday – after receiving a press release entitled ‘Pub Goers Set to Benefit from Abolition of Land Agreements Exclusion Order’ – I asked CAMRA’s press officer the question – had they issued any response to the HSC report or were they planning to?
CAMRA confirmed that they have not issued a press release, but have released the following quote to the media:
Iain Loe, CAMRA research manager, said “CAMRA welcomes the call by the Committee for the introduction of a minimum price per alcohol unit which will benefit community pubs by curbing the below cost selling of alcohol by supermarkets which can fuel pre-loading. We also welcome their suggestion that the Government should introduce a reduced rate of duty on beers below 2.8%.”
So there you have it. CAMRA supports minimum pricing – which we already knew – and has nothing to say about the rest of the report.
I’m not just going to indulge in knee-jerk CAMRA-bashing here. I’ll be asking CAMRA why they are not commenting more widely.
But in the meantime, what do you think? Is it CAMRA’s job to argue back against the HSC? Should they do so given that they claim to represent the interests of beer drinkers? Or is it too political? Is it outside their remit?
You can understand to an extent why drinks manufacturers are not arguing back – they would be hung out to dry by the media, treated (unfairly) with the same contempt as the cigarette companies who tried to argue that the link between smoking and lung cancer wasn’t proven.
But who SHOULD be fighting back? Someone has to. Surely it’s not just down to one or two independent journos and bloggers…
What do you think?

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

Some pretty ladies illustrate the problem

Everyone seemed to welcome the Myleene Klass post as a bit of light relief from my anti-neopro posts, so here’s a happy medium between the two, specially for Cooking Lager. Have a look at this poster, which is currently displayed on a crosstrack site at Finsbury Park Tube:

It’s safe to assume that these three ladies are not policewomen on duty, and should therefore not be wearing policewomen’s hats. But they are. That’s because they’re partying. They’re on a night out. They are cheeky – as well as the hats, one of them is sticking her tongue out at the camera. But that’s really all we can imply from the picture.
And what’s the caption? That’s right: ‘alcohol misuse in England is costing the NHS £2.7 billion a year’.
Simply because these women are having a good time on a night out, the implication is that they are ‘misusing’ alcohol. We’re used to the widely repeated images of women with their knickers round their ankles, or collapsed in the street, but now, you don’t even have to do that – simply by being young, happy and out with your friends, you look like someone who is ‘misusing’ alcohol.

Look again at the picture: they don’t look bleary-eyed. Their make-up is in good condition. They look quite sharp and alert. Their behaviour doesn’t look outrageous – they’re simply posing for a photo. They’re not doing anything anti-social. In fact quite the opposite, they look very friendly. They show no signs of intoxication whatsoever. Christ, it could be a teetotaller’s fancy dress party for all we know. But they’re still ‘misusing’ alcohol.
The tiny writing up in the corner says ‘representative image used’. In other words, this photo was probably posed by models. But these healthy, attractive, perfectly turned out models are quite clearly meant to ‘represent’ alcohol misuse.
And this isn’t an ad from a temperance or health group – it’s an ad for ITV news. It’s not attempting to define what constitutes alcohol misuse, merely reflect contemporary understanding of what alcohol misuse is, and who is doing the misusing.
The social demonisation of alcohol continues apace.

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

The Health Select Committee Report on Alcohol

I know I go on quite a bit about the politics of drinking. Here’s a very good illustration of why I do.

The Parliamentary Health Select Committee today issued its report on the ‘shocking’ levels of binge drinking in the UK, soaring hospital admissions and death rates attributable to alcohol, cost of drinking to the UK, and so on.
As usual with reports like this, the findings of the committee have been reported across the media as fact. Any dissenting voice is confined to a comment near the bottom of the piece from an alcohol industry spokesperson.
The report recommends, among other things, the following measures:
Pricing and taxation

  • Introduce minimum pricing
  • Increase in spirits duty
  • Increase “industrial white cider duty”
  • Duty increases should predominantly be on stronger drinks

Marketing

  • Statutory regulation of advertising from outside of alcohol and advertising industry
  • No billboards within 100 metres of schools
  • 9 o’ clock watershed for TV advertising
  • Cinema advertising only for films with an 18 certificate
  • If over 10% of audience/readership is under 18 then medium should not be used to advertise
  • Alcohol advertising banned on social networking sites

Licensing

  • Impose mandatory code urgently (which bans cut price drinks promotions, demands CCTV in pubs, and more)
  • Police to enforce ‘serving to drunks’ legislation
  • Government should assess why pubs associated with heavy drinking do not have their licences revoked
  • Government should give more powers to local authorities to allow them to restrict and revoke licences
  • Copy the restrictions on promotions in the off-trade introduced in Scotland, such as limited areas for alcohol consumption

Other

  • Mandatory labelling scheme on all drinks packaging
  • Improve alcohol treatment services

Now there are some sensible measures in there – I for one have no problem with steep increases in duty on tramp juice and a fairer allocation of duty on spirits relative to beer. And I’m still undecided on minimum pricing – I disagree with the level being recommended but can see some arguments for it as well as against it. But there are some deeply worrying recommendations too, and it’s the sheer volume of recommendations that’s really scary.

But why should we care?
Well, because Liam Donaldson told the committee (with his usual utter disregard of any factual substantiation whatsoever) that there are “no safe limits of drinking,” and that “alcohol is virtually akin to smoking as one of the biggest public health issues we have to face in this country.”
Bollocks of course. But officially published, sanctioned, and undisputed bollocks.
And that comparison with smoking is quite deliberate. Not all the measures listed above will come to pass, but arguably the most important line in the report is this one: “Education, information campaigns and labelling will not directly change behaviour, but they can change attitudes and make more potent policies more acceptable.”Smoking hasn’t been banned form British society. But consistent campaigning against smoking eventually changed social attitudes towards it. The smoking ban came in because the majority of people were in favour of it. Nobody but the ad industry minded when advertising and sponsorship were banned. Making smoking socially unacceptable was far more effective than trying to ban it outright. The anti-drink lobby have learned from this, and this report is a naked attempt to make drinking socially unacceptable.But drinking is NOT the same as smoking. The BMA itself acknowledges the beneficial effects of moderate drinking. Nevertheless, this report seeks to persuade people to treat it the same way, and is meeting with little resistance.I’ve spent most of the last day immersed in the report, following the links to its sources, trying to work out what they’re really saying, drawing graphs so data is more easily understandable. And I’ve found that the report is highly selective in the data it uses, misrepresents what other data is saying, and in many places contains blatant untruths. It needs to be challenged.I’ve got kind of obsessed with doing so, and I’ve got lots of charts, quotes etc which do not seek to manipulate or twist the data, like the anti-alcohol lobby unfailingly does, but just present the raw numbers – collated by independent and reliable government sources and even the NHS itself – which prove that many of the report’s conclusions are deeply – I’d argue even wilfully – flawed.Over the next few days, I’ll be putting up several posts which debunk each of the following, oft-repeated myths:

  • “Alcohol consumption in the UK is increasing”
  • “Binge drinking is increasing”
  • “Alcohol is becoming more affordable”
  • “Binge drinking has been made much worse by the introduction of 24 hour licensing”
  • “Alcohol related hospital admission are soaring”
  • “Alcohol advertising and promotion must be tightly regulated, primarily because it is encouraging children to drink more alcohol.”
  • “Alcohol abuse costs the country £55bn a year”

Sorry to go on. But please stay tuned. And if you ever hear someone spouting any of the above bollocks, please rip off the charts and use them to argue back.

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

Let’s be nice month is over

Danger! This much beer is ‘hazardous’!

Ah, New Year, a time for reflection, refocus, resolution. A time for getting fit, a time for… the neo-prohibitionists to go completely fucking apeshit, pouncing on the moment when many moderate drinkers prove they don’t have a drink problem by taking a few weeks off the sauce, and use it to ram fear and alarm down the nations throats as never before.

Binge drinking on New Year’s Eve alone could cost the NHS £23 million. New Years Eve itself saw our cities burn to the ground in a drink-fuelled orgy of violence and people falling over on the snowy pavements. The rising cost of treating drinkers could cripple the NHS. And most worryingly of all, one in four Brits are now consuming alcohol at ‘hazardous levels’. That last one must be true: it says so in the Observer, and is sourced from a NHS report.
Let’s just take that last one, as it’s the most worrying. Check out the NHS report for their justification of this claim, and it refers you to a separate appendix. Here, the source of this claim is given as the National Audit Office Report, Reducing Alcohol Harm. This is actually a well-written and researched report for the most part, but it tells us that the definition of ‘hazardous’ is from the World Health Organisation, who define ‘hazardous’ as ‘exceeding government recommended limits’ in the country in question, whatever those limits might be, even though they vary from country to country.
To get to the figure of 25%, the NAO report has used the recommended safe daily guidelines – expressed as units – to get to their definition of what constitutes ‘government recommended limits’.
Let’s not even get started on the fact that these units are completely arbitrary. It’s the old trick: the government unit recommendations are guidelines for drinking safely. They have been interpreted as limits, over which drinking is hazardous. According to the OED, a guideline is a ‘general rule or principle’. A limit, in this context, is ‘a restriction on the size or amount of something permissible or possible’. They mean entirely different things – but they are wilfully conflated whenever people talk about alcohol. If you think they mean the same thing, consider this example.
I got my calculator out again. You calculate a ‘unit’ of alcohol by multiplying the volume of liquid (in ml) by its ABV, and dividing by 1000. The ‘guideline’ alcohol consumption for men is no more than four units per day.
Take Kronenbourg. 1 pint = 568ml x 5%/1000 = 2.84 units
1.5 pints = 852ml x 5%/1000 = 4.26 units
The guideline for women is 3 units per day. 1 x 175 ml glass of 12% wine is 2.1 units. 1 x 150ml glass is – quite conveniently – 3 units.
If you drink a pint and a half of Kronenbourg in one day – even if that’s half a pint with lunch and one pint in the evening – you are a ‘hazardous’ drinker. If you drink one large glass of wine that is stronger than 12%, you are a ‘hazardous’ drinker. According to the latest NHS report, you’re no different from an alky downing a bottle of cheap vodka every day.
Furthermore, the way this data is collected, the actual question is along the lines of ‘did you drink this much on one day during the last week’. If you say yes, you’re included in the figure. So you could have drunk alcohol on only one out of seven days and you still count as a hazardous drinker.
A large glass of 13% abv wine, a pint and a half of lager – or two pints of real ale – in one day, with six days abstinence? Congratulations, you’re still a hazardous drinker.
This is what the whole of the UK national media have accepted without question.
Be scared.

You might also like...