The politics of public health
Tuesday, January 12, 2016 at 18:16 The announcement on Friday of new alcohol guidelines prompted this response from Forest's Action on Consumer Choice campaign:
New guidelines on alcohol consumption will cause unnecessary alarm and will be used to justify more nanny state policies, say campaigners.
The new advice, issued by the UK's chief medical officers, reduces the recommended level of alcohol consumption to just 14 units per week for men and women - equivalent to one pint of fairly weak beer per night - and suggests that pregnant women should not drink at all.
Action on Consumer Choice, which campaigns against excessive regulations on smoking, drinking and eating, argues the new guidelines lack evidence and are based on the idea that all risk should be removed from our everyday lives.
Rob Lyons, campaigns manager for Action on Consumer Choice, said: "The claim that there is no safe level of drinking flies in the face of the weight of studies showing that those who drink moderately have better or similar health outcomes to teetotallers.
"These guidelines seem devoid of common sense. They will be widely ignored by most drinkers but will cause unnecessary alarm for others.
"They seem designed to suggest that drinking alcohol in more than tiny quantities is abnormal and risky.
"The real danger is they will be used to justify more nanny state policies, from higher prices and alarmist health warnings to further restrictions on the sale of alcohol."
Rob was quoted by several newspapers, including the Mail (Health chief attacked over 'nanny state' alcohol guide that says a single glass of wine a day raises cancer risk).
He also appeared on the BBC News Channel and 13 local radio stations including BBC Cambridgeshire and BBC Merseyside. (You can listen to the interviews here and here.)
H/T too to Chris Snowdon who has been the most consistent and outspoken commentator on this issue for some time now.
Chris did a fine job on the Today programme (and elsewhere) and has posted several pieces on his blog including 'The Chief Medical Officer is misleading the public'.
There's not much more to add, apart from the following links:
Alcohol puritans: drunk on power? (Action on Consumer Choice)
The state needs to butt out of Britain’s drinking habits (Guardian)
Don’t let the public health zealots demonise us innocent drinkers (Telegraph)
Why those killjoy new alcohol rules are just plain wrong (Daily Mail)
One issue I will come back to, though, is this. In an otherwise impeccable article, Charles Moore (Daily Telegraph) contrasted alcohol with tobacco and wrote:
Unlike smoking which is – though people should be free to do it – unambiguously bad for you, drinking is subtle. It has its benefits and its dangers. It is a joy of civilisation, and a threat to it. It is like human life, in fact, and therefore peculiarly unsuited to policies of repression.
Is smoking really "unambiguously bad for you"? That's what we're led to believe, certainly, but it does seem odd that while many are (rightly) questioning the evidence on the ill effects of a moderate consumption of alcohol, sugar and smokeless tobacco, there is an almost unanimous consensus that smoking has no redeeming benefits and can only lead to ill health or moral turpitude.
Common sense – supported by some statistical evidence – suggests heavy smokers are putting their health at far greater risk than moderate drinkers, for example. But what about those who smoke moderately, take regular exercise, enjoy a healthy diet and don't drink to excess? Is smoking "unambiguously bad" for them too?
Eating, drinking, smoking and lack of exercise are all potential factors in ill health, as are poverty, loneliness and, inevitably, old age. In other words, health is a complicated issue and everyone is different.
Another problem is the term 'public health'. In Victorian times it meant solving problems caused by toxic drinking water, for example. In the 21st century it should mean tackling things like winter flu, sanitation problems caused by flooding, health scares such as ebola, or the threat of the MRSA bug in hospitals.
Instead the 'public' health industry has been commandeered by those who want to control our private habits. Individal health has been politicised and the evidence of the last two weeks shows just how powerful, oppressive and relentless the public health industry has become.
So if you enjoy drinking, smoking, vaping or eating whatever you please, remember this. There's no appeasing the public health lobby. They have no interest in choice or personal responsibility. It's all about money and control.
Prohibition – be it nicotine, alcohol or sugar – is their long-term goal because that will keep them in business long into the next century.
Does anyone really believe they will settle for a guideline of 14 units of alcohol per week? Or a 'smokefree' nation that allows five per cent of adults to light up without censure, with millions allowed to vape in peace?
With regard to vaping, btw, there are two types of public health campaigner. The first believes e-cigarettes renormalise the act of smoking and must be severely restricted or banned.
The second believes they are a useful tool that will help consign smoking to history. Once they have achieved that aim they will turn on e-cigs and other recreational nicotine products with the same evangelical fervour they brought to the war on tobacco.
Anyone who doesn't understand that doesn't understand the politics of public health. ('Useful idiots' is the expression that comes to mind.)
Thankfully the UK's chief medical officers have been called out on their latest 'guidelines' but that won't stop them demanding further regulations. They work in a bubble, surrounded by other public health campaigners who have bought into the new Jersulalem and won't tolerate dissent.
What's needed is a genuine coalition of consumers who will fight the public health industry tooth and nail – and not appease them because it suits the narrow self interest of one particular group or product.
Did I mention Action on Consumer Choice? To register your support click here!
Reader Comments (3)
The best way to end the gravy train is to cut their funding. It is amazing how fast many of them shut up once the funding dries up.
Anyone remember Don Shenker the CEO of Alcohol Concern? He was in the press talking disingenuous nonsense every week until the DH pulled the funding plug.
The sociology and psychology graduates who have styled themselves as public health "scientific experts" are there because of tax payer funded grants. John Holmes at Sheffield is a case in point. His output is not even close to good science but two governments and the BBC paid him to give them the answers that they wanted on MUP seemingly without regard to quality and amazingly he has now been paid again to produce a low quality biased report on behalf of anti-alcohol activists.
For the record, I have no issue with psychology graduates. Many do very useful things, some even do useful things in public health but the gravy train has diluted the talent pool and allowed activists free reign to abuse the system.
”Thankfully the UK's chief medical officers have been called out on their latest 'guidelines' but that won't stop them demanding further regulations.”
Spot on, Simon. I’m old enough to remember the very early days of the anti-smoking movement and they almost exactly mirror these first few baby-steps of the anti-alcohol one today. The public – still, as it is, largely comprised of people who enjoy a drink or two, whether occasionally or on a regular basis – simply can’t imagine what they (currently) regard as “a bunch of puritanical crackpots” gaining any traction whatsoever. But then no-one foresaw that anti-tobacco would become the all-powerful monolith that it has become, nor how utterly believing the general public (including themselves) would become of their every proclamation. Brainwashing is a curious thing, and it happens to people without their ever being aware that it’s happening. Look at the mindset of virtually any ex-smoker. They genuinely seem to have absolutely no awareness at all of how much they have changed as a person since giving up smoking. They truly think they’re still the “same old Fred” that they always were, but they never are. It isn’t that they remember how they used to feel, but now believe that they were mistaken – no, they genuinely have no recollection of it at all. And so it’ll be with alcohol. Before they know it, they will be jumping on the “teetotal bandwagon” like all the others and completely obliterating from their memories how much more fun everything was when one could go out and have a pint or two with friends without feeling like some sort of raging alcoholic.
Then, it’ll just be a case of “discovering” the most credible scenario for the alcohol equivalent of “passive smoking” to add a bit of self-righteousness to the mix and – hey presto! – we’ve got pubs who are only allowed to serve fully-grown adults with one drink (two if they are having a meal, maybe) and publicans being prosecuted for problems caused by people who’ve driven home intoxicated, got into fights with other people, or caused any damage on their way home (even if it's just laughing too loudly - a "breach of the peace") if they’ve dared to sell them any more than the permissible number of “units” – just to make sure that they toe the line and act as unpaid enforcers, just like they have to for the smoking ban.
Just watch this space.
Spot on and I agree about Moore's Telegraph article. It was a great piece until he made clear that he accepts all the bullshit on smoking in a way he doesn't about his favourite tipple - alcohol.
So - what this man of common sense and great intellect is saying - or accepting without question - is that someone could smoke 10 cigs in a whole lifetime and if they then go on to live into their 90s, it was those 10 fags that killed them?
There is a safe level of smoking. Fact. People are happily prejudicial about smoking and smokers because of a public hate campaign waged intensely against them over the last 20 years particularly. Before that it was a health information campaign that benefited everyone, and then it decided to veer from facts towards out and out scaremongering to encourage abuse, social exclusion and ultimately criminalisation of people who smoke. Fact.
However much people see what's going on with other consumer products, smokers and smoking have been moulded into something evil that generation after generation is being groomed to hate, fear and attack - and that includes attacking the people and not the product.
Writers like Moore have been complicit with that hate campaign and clearly still are even though they may not realise quite how they've been used by the political lobbyists posing as charities.