Pete Brown: Binge-drinking - the problem is only with the minority, stop distorting the truth

On Monday, October 19, the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA) revealed new figures, compiled using government data, which show alcohol consumption falling by over eight per cent.

This is the fifth consecutive year drink consumption has fallen, and the rate of decline is rising - you have to go back to 1948 to find a higher year-on-year slump.

I was curious to see what the media would make of this undeniable contradiction of the general perception of surging alcohol consumption. So I checked the BBC website, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail on the day of the announcement, and for two days after, to see how it was reported.

It wasn't.

Not a single one of these titles ran the story. (There's a brief mention of falling consumption in The Times - but only because it's in a letter from Brigid Simmonds, the new BBPA chief executive.) Why did they ignore these figures, which are surely newsworthy?

Well, they didn't have room - they were too busy demonising drink. In this three-day period alone, The Guardian ran with 'Alcohol death toll to reach 9,080 a year'; 'Alcohol is worse than cigarettes'; 'Alcohol hinders having a baby through IVF', and a scathing reportage piece on binge-drinkers in Manchester.

The Mail went with the IVF story; 'Wind-down wine alert: The relaxing glass that is turning working mothers into alcoholics'; 'Drinking and obesity fuel surge in liver disease among middle-age Britons'; 'Alcohol-fuelled air rage incidents on the rise'; and 'Age of the female thug: Violent crime by women goes up 80% under Labour' (accompanied by a picture of a ladette swigging booze).

The BBC and other papers ran with a rich mix of the above, referring to 'the growing binge-drinking problem' and 'surging alcohol consumption' in direct contravention of the cold, hard facts.

When you've united the Mail and The Guardian with one voice, there's no doubt you're the moral panic of the day. As Labour and the Conservatives set out manifestos that are left and right-wing respectively for the first time in a generation, bashing booze is one issue on which they still sound the same. They're only doing so because, with less than a year to go before an election, they see curbs on drinking as a vote winner. (Remember, the majority of the public were in favour of a smoking ban).

So what do we do?

The problem is, the anti-drink lobby has some stats of its own. Drink-related liver disease is on the up. Hospital admissions with a link to alcohol abuse are rising. The only possible way both sets of data can be correct is that a minority are increasingly drinking to excess, and the majority are drinking more moderately.

If one group of people is misusing alcohol and others aren't, the problem is clearly not relaxed licensing laws, or pricing, because if it was, drinking would be on the rise across the board. It isn't.

The drinks industry must acknowledge the existence of the problem among the minority, and in return demand that the anti-alcohol lobby accepts the declining problem overall.

Brigid Simmonds is off to an impressive start at the BBPA. She points out - where people will listen - that these figures prove blanket measures to tackle alcohol abuse are not the answer. But at the moment, she's a lone voice, confined to the trade press and BBPA press releases.

We need to ask why some people are abusing alcohol. Binge-drinking is not the prevailing cultural attitude, as some suggest. It's not because of the availability of drink. We all need to demand of people studying the problem that they study it properly. We need to call out our newspapers on their shameful distortion of the truth.

We must prove that we have a grown-up approach to the problems that do exist around alcohol - even if the neo-prohibitionists don't.