Sorry if I’ve misled you but I’m afraid I’m not talking about climate change, but about the equally false problem with alcohol consumption. As Leg Iron and others often observe the puritans and statists only have one play book, everything they do follows the same strategy. So it is with the current panic over drinking, as the protests against alcohol controls rise and look like derailing the project along comes a handy study that shows the problem really is as bad as the puritans claim it’s just we’ve all been “lying about how much we drink”. It seems that according to the “boffins” over at UCL we’ve been “under reporting” our consumption. This has been picked up by quite a few papers and made the front page of the Metro which is where I first saw it, but none of those bastions of investigative journalism that make up the mainstream media seem to have paid much attention to a couple of small details the main one being that the figures are “putative” or as the Metro did more honestly put it “guess work”. So with both health and social problems from booze falling how did UCL manage to generate so much panic? Well they started with this:
“International studies have shown that self-reported alcohol consumption only accounts for between 40 and 60 per cent of alcohol sales.”
Decided it must be true in the UK (I note that they don’t say what studies or when they were done) and concluded that:
“Currently we don’t know who consumes almost half of all the alcohol sold in England.”
Then they assumed that this “missing” alcohol was being drink evenly across the board, not just by problem drinkers and tourists say, and thus:
“the study also shows that when under-reporting is taken in to account, approximately half of men and women could be classed as ‘binge drinkers’”
So look there’s still a problem and stringent controls are needed. Before we go on let’s take a quick look at that “binge drinking” problem:
Bind drinking is “defined by the Department of Health as consuming more than eight units of alcohol in a single session for men, and more than six units for women”
So for men that’s 4 pints for women 3 or less than a single bottle of wine – I can’t help but feel that the people who come up with these limits would die from shock if they saw someone going out to get really leathered. Anyway enough of that let’s see where UCL got their information from:
“The team used data from the General Lifestyle Survey (GLF) 2008 to analyse self-reported average weekly alcohol consumption levels in 12,490 adults. The team used data from the General Lifestyle Survey (GLF) 2008 to analyse self-reported average weekly alcohol consumption levels in 12,490 adults.”
and
“The team used data from the Health Survey for England (HSE) 2008 to analyse self-reported alcohol consumption on the heaviest drinking day in the last week among 9,608 adults.”
So fair enough they have, not very recent, figures on how much we’ve reported drinking, but no mention of any stats on how much we’ve been buying. But before we consider that, consider this back in 2011 the BBC had drinking figures for 2009 and the NHS appear to have easy to find statistics for 2012, so you’d have thought that maybe UCL could at the very lest adjust for more current numbers.
However let’s go back to the alleged purpose of this “research” from the BBC we learn:
‘Sadie Boniface, lead author of the study at University College, said: “Currently we don’t know who consumes almost half of all alcohol in England. This study was conducted to show what alcohol consumption would look like when all of what is sold is accounted for, if everyone under-reported equally.”‘
It then goes onto say:
“The team used alcohol sales data from Revenue and Customs and compared it with two self-reporting alcohol consumption surveys conducted in 2008”
But from the data available to us mere peons i can’t find what year they have HMRC data from nor anything much about it, unlike the two “under reporting” studies. Still I have the internet and can dick around a bit and find that there’s no easy to find actual count of the amount of booze sold, but Drinks Business reports falling sales, and the HMRC does make available the tax revenue from Alcohol. Which includes this graph of the tax revenue:
Comparing 2008 to 2012 Q1 shows a 15% rise in tax revenue and Q4 shows a 9% rise in tax income, now it’s important to remember that the HMRC collect from manufacturers and importers not point of sale, so those revenues don’t directly relate to sales. That aside though when you consider that (BBC):
“Alcohol duties have been rising at above the rate of inflation since 2008, when automatic increases came in.”
That 2% above inflation between the start of 2008 and the start of 2012 gives a compound 8% rise in the tax take, but what was inflation doing for those 4 years? the compound rate of inflation gives a revenue increase of 14% so the increase in revenue from the rise duty rates is a grand total of 22%, so looking at the change in actual revenue taken there’s been either a 7% or 13% fall in the volume alcohol being taxed. It does make me wonder if 2008 is significant in that that’s the year the duty escalator was introduced.
Like I said at the start it’s the same method everywhere junk science for catastrophic man made climate change, Junk science for minimum pricing and now what looks to me a lot like junk science for the binge drinking problem. If these people ever discover that we don’t actually have to buy booze and can get it without paying duty we can probably expect to discover we’re under reporting even more*.
Oh and if anyone can get me a copy of the actual published paper I’d be terribly grateful.
* Yes I do realise that this partly undermines my own argument, but it also makes UCLs numbers even more blatant guess work – plucked out of the air just like the maximum units nonsense.
