So, it's finally going to happen! The remorseless pressure of Medical Temperance has finally paid off, and the Coalition Government is going to introduce a minimum price for alcohol, reportedly at 40 pence per unit. The government predicts that this will significantly change the behaviour of “binge drinkers” – those who cause the most problems for hospitals and the police – by making it more expensive to get drunk. But what is the evidence for this?

The Sheffield University Review predicts, on the basis of its mathematical model, that a 50p minimum price would mean that a young binge drinker will drink 0.8 units of alcohol less per week – about ⅓ of a pint of lager or beer over a seven-day period. Or, they'd need to spend all of £1.14 per week to maintain their drinking at the same level as before. This report is the “evidence” usually cited in support of minimum pricing. Presumably a 40 pence minimum price will have an even smaller impact.

And it is no surprise this Review is so widely quoted, because there is no evidence that minimum pricing, as envisaged by the government, will deliver the benefits claimed. This is because outside of government alcohol monopolies like Canada, it hasn't been introduced anywhere in the world.

Anyone who thinks that this is a magic bullet that will end the youthful carnival in city-centres is clearly deluded. But this is really all about symbolism. Now that government has become the ‘price-giver' for the licensed trade, the image of alcohol as “no ordinary product”, but as something dangerous that we all need to be protected from, has become official policy. The Medical Temperance view of alcohol is in the ascendance. Their view chimes with government - not least because it gives them a ‘health concern' smokescreen behind which they can introduce what is nothing more than a sin tax.

An online BBC News item gave a number of examples of how a minimum price would impact. Inevitably an old Temperance favourite – super-strength cider – made an appearance in the BBC's article: “Bulk-bought strong cider, costing 87p a can and containing four units, would double in price to at least £1.60.” Well, what a relief, we can all sleep safely in our beds then! What they neglected to mention is that cheap, strong white cider accounts for one tenth of one percent of pure alcohol consumed in this country.

The introduction of minimum pricing represents the triumph of the politics of prejudice and political expedience over rational, evidence-based public policy making. It also symbolises the failure of the drinks' industry to mount a united challenge to Medical Temperance, or to contest the medico/crime and disorder frame of reference that they have successfully established.

If there is a challenge to this in the European Court of Justice, on the basis that it conflicts with European competition law, you can expect plenty of posturing from Mr Cameron “standing up to Europe” in order to throw more red meat to his anti-EU back benchers. What a complete train wreck!

It was reported last year that London Mayor Boris Johnson wanted anyone convicted of an alcohol-related violent offence to be banned from drinking, and to report to their local police station once a day for a ‘sobriety test’ – on pain of imprisonment, if they failed! Quite rightly the Government dismissed this proposal and you might have thought that would be the end of it. But, no! Boris is back with a high-tech solution from America: a “sobriety bracelet scheme”, for those convicted of serious drink-related offences.

It works like this: On conviction for a drink-related offence the Court orders a community sentence, but imposes a ‘sobriety condition’; the offender must abstain from drinking alcohol for a set period of time, say, six months. To enforce this, the offender is fitted with an ankle bracelet that can detect alcohol by measuring air and perspiration emissions from the skin every 30 minutes. Blood alcohol levels as low as 0.02% can apparently be detected, and the bracelets can tell when the alcohol was consumed and then electronically transmit that information to a monitoring station. The police are then informed that the offender has broken his ‘sobriety condition’ and can arrest him and bring him before the court.

The Ministry of Justice has provided £400,000 to trial this scheme in London. In October it was announced that the equipment was being introduced in Scotland as part of a pilot scheme for violent offenders on community sentences.

I have three major concerns about this: firstly, I think we shouldn’t simply judge a policy on the basis of its intended outcomes, but also on what it says about the relationship between the State and the individual. And this scheme smacks far too much of ‘Brave New World’ for me.

Secondly, my suspicion is it will not reduce alcohol-related crime, but simply fill up the prisons with lots of young men on short sentences who “breach their tag” – even though the original offence for which they were tagged didn’t merit a prison sentence.

And thirdly, it’s not difficult to imagine a development of this technology so that it could be applied to the operation of individual licensed premises. I can imagine the Government empowering licensing authorities to require premises in the night-time economy to provide a bracelet to every customer on a Friday and Saturday night. If the customer consumes more than, say, four units of alcohol, this is electronically communicated to a unit behind the bar, the bracelet illuminates and the customer has to leave. But surely I’m being paranoid, right? Surely no government is going to regulate the tick-and-tock of individual behaviour in this way? That’s precisely what people said when the smoking ban was first mooted. Watch this space.

For too long the licensed retail sector has been on the defensive, engaged in anxious hand-wringing when confronted by the remorselessly grim alcohol-harm numbers generated by the health lobby. At last there is hope of some commonsense in health statistics, and with it the possibility of creating a more rational debate about alcohol and its place in society.

The Department of Health has published a new framework of public health outcomes. Alcohol is addressed in the ‘Health Improvement’ domain, along with a new basis for counting the number of alcohol-related hospital admissions – a crucial indicator: “the preferred option is for an indicator based on just alcohol-related primary diagnoses”. This apparently obscure statistical change is important, because exaggerated and distorted “medical statistics” have been used to beat-up the industry over recent years, and to justify the Medical Temperance ‘whole population’ approach to reducing alcohol-harms. Remember those lurid headlines that read “Over a million alcohol–related hospital admissions a year” OR “Drinking-related hospital cases double in ten years”?

Perverse statistics!

How are such numbers arrived at? When a person is admitted to hospital he might be suffering from a number of medical conditions. The figure of a million alcohol-related admissions a year is based on all the conditions recorded for every patient, not just the one he was admitted for – whether or not the primary diagnosis that led to admission was alcohol-related. Confused? Here’s an example:

In future the way alcohol-related hospital admissions are counted will be based only on the ‘primary diagnosis’ that led to the patient’s admission in the first place. Alcohol-related hospital admission episodes, as previously counted, totalled 1,057,000 for 2009/10. Take out all the supplementary diagnoses that resulted in alcohol attributable fractions and that figure reduces to 194,800! This figure is then divided between primary diagnoses that are ‘wholly attributable’ to alcohol (68,400 of the total) and those that are ‘partly attributable’ – alcohol may be part of the reason for admission, or may not - (126,500 of the total). So hospital admissions that we can definitely say are for an alcohol-related cause only, are just 54% of the total. So when you drill down the figures they reduce from a million to 194,000 to 68,000!

‘Frequent-flyers’

But it gets worse! Examine the statistical tables closely and you find a footnote that reads: “Admissions do not represent the number of inpatients, as a person may have more than one admission within the year.” This is a reference to what medics call “frequent flyers” - people who turn up drunk or injured at A&E department’s week-in, week-out. So we know how many “admission episodes” there are, but not how many people generated them. But this is crucial information. From the point of view of the average member of the public the impression is precisely that ‘hospital admissions’ = ‘people admitted to hospital’ when in fact it doesn’t. However, in Scotland a parliamentary question in 2009 discovered that about a third of alcohol-related hospital admissions were repeat admissions – frequent flyers. Clearly the number of patients admitted is significantly less than the number of admissions. So we’re actually looking at quite a small cohort of problem drinkers.

The ‘whole population’ approach

The point I’m getting at here is that Medical Temperance bases its view of how to reduce alcohol-harms on the ‘whole population’ approach - the idea that “we all need to drink less”; that the only way to reduce alcohol-harms is to suppress the mass market in alcohol. And this approach has the ear of Government. But it turns out that actually relatively small, discrete categories of person are responsible for generating a large percentage of alcohol-related hospital admissions, and this blows a big hole in the ‘whole population’ approach and has profound implications for alcohol policy.

The whole population approach relies on stoking a continuous moral panic about alcohol. This in turn relies upon a litany of perverse statistics, collected by arcane methods of incredible complexity, the bogus nature of which are only now becoming apparent. Instead of pathologising normal, social drinking, we need to identify and treat that small minority of people who have a genuinely unhealthy relationship with alcohol. Straight statistics would be a helpful start.

As we survey the current on-trade landscape it's apparent that if operators want to reverse the trend whereby 'staying in' has become the new 'going out', then finding ways to add value to the experience of going out is absolutely key.

This means raising the quality of the customer experience by taking customer service to new levels. Wine is an important category for the on-trade and not just for restaurants, but increasingly for pubs and bars as well. Indeed, these categories have become increasingly blurred as the pub and bar trade has cashed in on casual dining to great effect.

But 'casual' doesn't have to mean slapdash - and indeed it shouldn't! Staff with a good knowledge of wines used to be the preserve of top-class restaurants when wine had a high snob-appeal. But the world has moved on, and the growing demand for wine means that staff selling and serving it in any type of premises should all have a good understanding of the basics. That's why CPL Training has decided to make wine training available on open, scheduled courses available at 15 locations throughout the UK.

The Wine and Spirits Education Trust (WSET) one-day Foundation Certificate in Wine will not only help you know your claret from your Beaujolais, but will teach you the main styles of wine, how to match wine to food, how to serve it and the characteristics of the main grape varieties. You'll also be introduced to the WSET Systematic Approach to Wine Tasting!

Can you imagine the difference this could make to the customer experience in your venue? Staff who can advise customers how to make wine choices that complement the food; who can persuade customers to trade up to a new wine by enthusiastically describing how wonderful it tastes; or advising younger customers on a good, light party wine.

Investing in a little staff training in wine could seriously enhance your bottom line!

The proposal to introduce a minimum unit price for alcohol is back on the agenda – and not just in Scotland, where legislation seems certain to be passed. Despite noises to the contrary from Government, Prime Minister David Cameron has again raised this prospect. And of course Alcohol Concern and the rest of the Medical Temperance Lobby agree.

I totally understand why people running pubs and bars want to see a more level playing field with the off-trade, particularly given the price of some supermarket alcohol deals. But this is a bad idea for a number of reasons.

The most important reason for me is the ‘law of unintended consequences’. As an example: a 75cl bottle of ordinary, blended Scotch whisky, containing 30 units of alcohol, retails in my local supermarket for £12. That’s 40 pence per unit. Introduce a minimum price of 50 pence and the cost rises to £15 a bottle. A big percentage increase from a low base, but not enough, I would suggest, to deter dependent drinkers (the clue is in the word ‘dependent’), and not enough to tip people out of the living room and back into the taproom of the pub or bar. So temperance campaigners would gain little from this and the on-trade would gain nothing. But the unintended consequence would be that supermarkets would see a jump in profits – far more than they would lose from any conceivable fall in demand arising out of the increase in price. Now I’m not against supermarkets making profits – I want to see every business profitable – but that’s not meant to be the point of the exercise, is it?

At this point Alcohol Concern and the BMA might say that is why we need to introduce a higher minimum price – one that really would bite. Suppose that was 80 pence per unit. That would see our bottle of Scotch double in price to £24 a bottle. That might well deter consumption and make drinkers think twice about where they do their drinking, but what about the unintended consequences? At £24 a bottle that’s the end of the Scotch whisky industry right there! No one is going to pay £24 for blended Scotch when they can buy a single malt for just a few £s more. And only a minority of whisky drinkers can afford to do that. The same would apply to the affordability of other spirits. Not even Alex Salmond and the Righteous Brothers of the SNP would want to see the end of their biggest export earner!

So this is the dilemma with minimum pricing: if you introduce it at a level where it won’t do much harm to the industry, it won’t achieve what campaigners want, but will raise prices at a time of economic hardship. If you introduce it at a level where it might impact on demand and persuade more people to drink in a supervised environment, it will also cause untold economic damage to the drinks’ producers and the jobs they support.

This is the sort of mess we will get into if we invite government price regulators to put themselves in the middle of the buyer-seller relationship.

Paul Chase, Director and Head of UK Compliance, CPL Training

Anyone remember this debate between me and Keith Vaz MP, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9otA1bAKKqA

Yes/No? Well, four years on I thought it would be a good idea to see what, if anything, has changed in almost half a decade.

The debate between me and Keith Vaz was sparked by the tragic killing of Gary Newlove from Warrington, who was kicked to death by a gang of drunken youths after remonstrating with them for creating a nuisance outside his home. Inevitably the then Chief Constable of Cheshire, Peter Fahy, blamed bad parents and cheap booze for youth disorder. Exploiting a tragedy that is an untypical outcome of alcohol use, and holding it up as if it was entirely typical, is of course a well-used tactic of those who seek to emotionalise a debate or jump on a bandwagon.

One has to say that the spectacular return of alcohol as a social problem is now a matter of record. The Licensing Act 2003, which came into force at the end of 2005, was meant to liberalise the regime that controlled the sale of alcohol. Since then legislative repentance has kicked-in with a vengeance! There have been no less than four major reforms to the 2003 Act that have dealt with persistent selling to children, creating alcohol disorder zones (never used), drinking banning orders, summary review of premises licences, increasing police powers to confiscate alcohol, making objecting to licence applications easier, banning irresponsible alcohol promotions – the list is detailed and almost endless!

And yet the perception that is peddled to the public by tabloid television and the press is still one of ‘binge Britain’ or ‘booze Britain’ resulting from “24-hour drinking.” Let’s just get the facts straight:

Here are five of the more common myths:

Myth: Alcohol is cheaper than ever before.

Fact: Despite examples of cheap alcohol in supermarkets, the price of alcohol overall has increased by 20% since 1980 in real terms, when measured against the Retail Price Index. But average earnings have doubled since 1980, so alcohol is now more affordable, not cheaper.

Myth: Medical campaigners claim that in the five years to 2008/09 there has been a 65% increase in the number of people being admitted to hospital for ‘alcohol-related reasons’. They also claim that there were 825 more alcohol-related admissions a day than five years ago.

Fact: Nobody knows how many hospital admissions are actually alcohol-related! No one actually records alcohol-related hospital admissions, the figures are all estimated by using a modelling technique developed by the World Health Organisation in 2003. This technique produces an estimate, known as the ‘Alcohol Attributable Fraction’, of the proportion of hospital admissions attributable to alcohol.

Myth: Britain has one of the worst rates of liver disease in the world.

Fact: We’re not even one of the worst in Europe. England is below the European average and sixteen out of twenty seven countries have worse rates of liver disease than us.

Myth: Underage and teenage drinking is getting worse.

Fact: The proportion of 11-15 year olds who have never drank alcohol has increased in recent years from 39% in 2003 to 48% now. (Source: Statistics on Alcohol England 2010, NHS).

Myth: We’re drinking more and more each year!

Fact: We’ve been drinking less and less each year since 2004 and our alcohol consumption is falling at the fastest rate for more than 60 years. Alcohol consumption has fallen by 9% in the past six years.

The 14th – 20th November sees the launch by anti-alcohol charity Alcohol Concern of the 'Alcohol Concern Charter', using their annual 'Alcohol Awareness Week' as a platform. The Charter, which they invite us all to sign, calls for a number of things, including "the right to objective and independent information and education on the consequences of alcohol consumption on health, the family and society."

The pity is they don’t live up to their own Charter’s aspirations. Alcohol Concern list as fact a number of highly contentious claims which are based on anything but "objective and independent information". For example they claim as fact:

• Every hour more than 100 people go into hospital in England and Wales with an alcohol-related condition
• Every day more than 40 people die as a result of alcohol in England and Wales

The truth is no one actually knows how many alcohol-related hospital admissions there are or how many people die as a result of alcohol in England and Wales. It is simply not the case that a qualified clinician diagnoses and records each and every alcohol-related hospital admission or death, and that the numbers are then collated nationally.

In fact alcohol-related hospital admissions are calculated using a complex mathematical model, developed by the World Health Organisation in 2003, that estimates the disease burden and acute consequences of alcohol consumption through the calculation of something called 'attributable fractions'. The 'attributable fraction' is defined as the proportion of disease risk in a population that would not have occurred, if exposure to a given risk factor (alcohol) had not taken place. So in reality all the figures quoted by Alcohol Concern, about alcohol-related hospital admissions and alcohol-related deaths are simply an estimate calculated from an 11 year-old mathematical model.

Alcohol Concern originated from a split with the Institute of Alcohol Studies, which is a straight-down-the line abolitionist organisation, linked to the International Order of Good Templars that wants a "world free of alcohol and other drugs". Alcohol Concern is campaigning for a “life free from the effects of alcohol harms”. It is difficult in practice to put a piece of paper between these two positions. Although they don’t openly call for the abolition of alcohol they advocate reducing the level of alcohol consumption across the whole population - not just for ‘problem drinkers' - but everyone needs to drink less, so far as they are concerned.

The Coalition Government recently cut off £400,000 of funding provided by the Department for Health, prompting the resignation of Alcohol Concern’s Chief Executive Don Shenker. This follows their rejection of the industry responsibility deal to which government and the drinks’ industry are committed. Alcohol concern rejects any involvement by the drinks’ industry in the formation of alcohol policy as tantamount to supping with the Devil!

Alcohol Awareness Week and the Alcohol Concern Charter are an attempt to plug the funding gap by recruiting grass-roots support. By quoting alarmist and distorted statistics Alcohol Concern hopes to discover an army of cause-oriented activists willing to tilt at windmills. Who knows, a tented city of oh-so-sincere citizens may well be pitched outside a brewery or distillery near you!

I had a distinct sense of chickens coming home to roost when I heard that Alcohol Concern had lost its annual funding from the Department of Health. This core funding was worth some £300,000 to £400,000 a year to the anti-alcohol charity. The consequence is that Alcohol Concern has had to sell its offices and restructure. The main victims of this are Chief Executive Don Shenker, and its full-time fundraiser, who have both had to resign because the charity can no longer afford to pay their salaries.

Some have suggested that this was Government “revenge” for Alcohol Concern walking away from the Industry Alcohol Social Responsibility Deal. I just think it’s a lesson in the hard reality of politics in a recession. If you set your face against public policy, don’t expect Government to give you scarce public money in order to assist you in doing so.

The fact is that Alcohol Concern, and their sister charity in Scotland Alcohol Focus, have hardened their position in relation to the issue of alcohol-related harms and how to reduce them. They’ve moved from promoting responsible drinking to advocating the reduction of alcohol consumption across the whole population – “We all need to drink less” - the Medical Temperance view. This has put them on a collision course with the drinks’ industry, and with a Government at Westminster which is signalling that the industry is part of the solution, not the cause of the problem.

In Scotland Alcohol Focus now rejects any kind of industry funding, but can rely on a Scottish Government as ideologically opposed to alcohol as they are. But Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has expressed his disdain for an approach that “ramps up the righteousness and reaches for the regulations”. This not-so-subtle shift seems to have passed Alcohol Concern by.

The interface between the politics of recession and the politics of drinking has resulted in Alcohol Concern becoming a casualty. Sadly, I suspect that the lesson they will draw from this isn’t that they were too hard-line for their own good, but that they weren’t hard-line enough. Now that they’ve alienated both Government and the drinks’ industry, Alcohol Concern will need to find a constituency of support prepared to fund them. To do that I suspect they will need to become less ideological. Don Shenker’s departure can only assist in that regard.

The Bribery Act 2010 comes into force today (1st July 2011). This legal change will affect how all businesses operate. The BA2010 creates four new offences:

1. Paying bribes.
2. Receiving bribes.
3. Bribing a foreign public official.
4. Failure of commercial organisations to prevent bribery.

The first two offences are similar to existing law albeit they introduce the central concept that a bribe is intended to induce ‘improper performance’ in relation to a ‘relevant function or activity’. The third offence covers offering bribes to foreign officials; the fourth offence can only be committed by commercial organisations – although senior officers/directors of such organisations can be held personally liable for ‘failure to prevent’.

The fourth offence will be committed where:

• A person associated with a commercial organisation (employee, agent or external third party) bribes another person in order to gain or retain a business advantage, and
• the organisation cannot show it had adequate procedures in place to prevent bribes being paid – the ‘due diligence’ defence.

Hospitality, promotional and other business expenditure

The provision of bone fide hospitality, promotional or other business expenditure which seeks to improve the image of the Company in order to better present its products or services, or establish cordial relations with customers or industry stakeholders, is an established way of doing business and is not criminalised by the BA2010.

It is, however, clear that hospitality could be employed as a bribe and the key point is that any such expenditure must be reasonable and proportionate.

To avoid falling foul of the new law it is important that all businesses put in place a bribery policy and do a risk assessment to demonstrate due diligence. CPL Training has developed a Bribery Act Compliance e-learning course which will be made available online. The course will detail all the offences under the new Act, how to construct an anti-bribery policy and do a risk assessment in order to ensure compliance and avoid offences.

The makers of super-strength white ciders have few friends these days. A recent report entitled ‘White Cider and Street Drinkers’, commissioned by Alcohol Concern, highlights the impact that these drinks have on homeless people. Don Shenker of Alcohol Concern has called on the Government to “Tax white cider out of the market”. This demand has the support of two charities for the homeless – St Mungo’s and Thamesreach.

Whilst I am neither a drinker, nor a defender of these particular ciders, I think we should be wary of those who proffer simple solutions to complex problems. The alcoholism of homeless people isn’t caused by the availability of a particular ‘problem drink’; it’s caused by the despair and depression that results from homelessness. Homeless people invariably suffer from a complex set of mental health, psychological and social problems. The desire of some homeless people to numb this pain doesn’t go away if you ban a particular drinks’ product. There will always be a substitute, whether it’s an alcoholic one or some other substance.

The wider agenda

Neither should we forget that Alcohol Concern has a much wider agenda. Their strategy has always been to selectively demonise drinks’ categories that have only marginal market penetration, link them to groups of ‘vulnerable drinkers’, and then leverage the demand for alcohol restrictions on a much wider scale. Remember ‘alcopops’ and ‘vulnerable young drinkers’? Even at its peak this category accounted for less than 3.5% of the total volume of alcohol consumed in the UK. Remember ‘toffee vodka’ aimed apparently at ‘vulnerable young girl drinkers’? White cider has an even smaller market share – only about a tenth of one percent. Yet these categories are held up as typical examples of a drinks’ industry out of control, and unconcerned about the social impact of its products.

Typically, Alcohol Concern links the demand for higher taxes for white cider to higher taxes for all ciders, which would involve levelling-up cider duties to match beer duty rates. We surely need to separate the lower taxes that are designed to protect our indigenous cider industry from the purchase of the cheap, foreign apple concentrate that is used in the production of super-strength white cider.

And what is a ‘super-strength’ drink? They appear to define it as a beer or cider over 5% ABV. So, what about wine then? Wines are typically around 11% to 13.5% ABV; or spirits – 37.5% to 40% ABV. But, I hear you say, it’s not just strength, but quantity consumed that matters. But for Alcohol Concern this is just quibbling. They want Government to empower local authorities to ban the sale of all strong drinks in their locality – not just white cider. In their report they quote Westminster Council as providing the model other councils should follow. Westminster Council has already banned specific premises from selling alcohol products above 5.5% ABV. They state “There has been little or no resistance to this”. But they would go further and give councils the right to impose such conditions across their entire area, as a matter of policy.

The hidden agenda

Thus the scene would be set for local government to set maximum alcoholic strengths; meanwhile Alcohol Concern continues to campaign for a minimum price per unit. For all those in the pub sector who supported minimum pricing for the off-trade, thinking that this would tip drinkers out of the living room and into the tap room, the strategy of Alcohol Concern is now plain for all to see: a licensed retail sector where a floor is put under prices and a ceiling on alcoholic strength, in the name of ‘protecting vulnerable groups’, will affect all sectors of the licensed trade, and infantilise the decisions of responsible, adult drinkers. So this report is not just about white cider and street drinkers, it’s a platform from which they seek to introduce an alcohol strength ceiling across the industry and across the country. Separately they propose a minimum price, and just hope that we won’t join up the dots! Demonising drinks’ categories by reference to ‘vulnerable groups’ is just a cynical way of emotionalising the issues, and softening up political and public opinion for further restrictions on all drinks and all drinkers.

When you drill all this down, what does Alcohol Concern think would be the consequence for homeless street drinkers of getting rid of white cider? The report says: “If white cider was no longer available it would be very naive to believe that dependent street drinkers would stop drinking.” Quite so! “The hope among workers interviewed is that many would change to 5% ABV ciders instead.” What? It doesn’t occur to them that if they switch to a lower strength cider they’ll just drink more of it? But just to be on the safe side, the report expresses the view that such drinkers “might be likely to steer towards super-strength lager as their next port of call”, hence the need to restrict them as well! Where does this nonsense stop?

Aren’t we missing the point here? It isn’t the availability of alcohol that causes homeless people to drink, it is homelessness; getting rid of so-called ‘problem drinks’ doesn’t get rid of problem drinkers. Those engaged in a never-ending quest to restrict, regulate, control and tax such drinks out of existence need to reflect on where the next scapegoat will come from were they to be successful. Shouldn’t we just put more resources into helping the homeless find homes, and stop using ‘protection of vulnerable groups’ to justify the hidden agenda? Alcohol Concern advocates the control of products with a tiny market penetration as the thin end of a wedge designed to restrict the drinking choices of everyone. They have an ill-concealed ideological objection to alcohol, as such.

The direction of their travel is clear. But what is the destination? When will the neo-prohibitionists of Alcohol Concern come out of the closet?

Paul Chase is a Director and Head of UK compliance at CPL Training