Water way to run a country
Here is a Morning Advertiser health warning. Please take notice: it may prevent you having a heart attack. Any day now, as you walk along the high streets of your town, you may well see this startling poster on billboards or bus stops: "Next time you visit the pub, why not have a pint of water."
This is what the country's leading drinks suppliers are having to spend their meagre earnings on these days to keep the health fanatics happy. The poster, and there is a series of them, all in similar PC vein, is the first offering from Project 10, the industry's newest and most expensively-funded responsible-drinking organisation.
The group, comprising top chief executives, was our trade's response to being summoned to No 10 Downing Street nearly 18 months ago and being told in no uncertain terms that unless something was done to curb alcoholic over-indulgence,
all kinds of terrible and draconian things would be visited on the trade, including bans on drinks advertising and promotions.
It's taken a while to respond, but it looks like Project 10 is finally rolling out, and who knows what other startling messages it will be offering to stick in the craw of licensees.
One has sympathy for the Project 10 team. It's responding as best it can to the Government's big stick. And if it has to produce ludicrous public-health messages urging people to drink water in order to get Government off its back, well that just shows what a state the country's got itself into over the use of alcohol.
But what we can feel dismay over, is the continuing failure to target problem drinking, rather than overall consumption, and deal with the abusers of alcohol, using the state's existing powers. How much more sensible it would be for police to sort out
individual problems, rather than spend millions of pounds of public and private money trying to persuade people not to drink alcohol when they go to the pub.
And this is not simply a case of our trade saying
"Leave the pubs alone, Government - sort out the supermarkets." It can't be with so many dangerous promotions going on in bars and pubs these days ("tossers' Tuesday", for example, when punters get free drinks if the coin lands the right way up - an utter disgrace).
No, it's about active policing on the ground, the kind of policing that would discover where kids holidaying in Newquay are really getting their alcohol from, rather than lazily blaming the town's licensees. However, with even our army not getting the resources it requires in life and death situations because the country's broke, there's fat chance of old-style policing returning. So we'd better expect more posters encouraging us to drink water. But who seriously thinks that's going to make the blindest bit of difference to the young problem drinkers of today?
