When binge drinking isn't binge drinking...

There’s an epidemic of middle class binge drinking. Apparently:

A comprehensive survey claims that middle aged, professional Britons are more likely to exceed recommended daily levels of alcohol consumption than the working-classes, with twice as many drinking every night of the week.

Which would be far more concerning if they recommended daily levels weren’t, well, made up:

Mr Smith, a former Editor of the British Medical Journal, said that members of the working party were so concerned by growing evidence of the chronic damage caused by heavy, long-term drinking that they felt obliged to produce guidelines. “Those limits were really plucked out of the air. They were not based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee,” he said.

Of course, that doesn’t stop our leaders treating these stats as the gospel truth:

Dawn Primarolo, the Public Health Minister, said: "We are only now beginning a sustained programme to inform people about the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption. However, initial tracking from our Units campaign, launched in May last year, shows more people know how much is safe to drink and know how many units are in their drinks."

Except, Dawn, those limits are still made up. So people may be aware of how many units they should drink based on your pointless yet no doubt expensive campaign, but realistically it is of fuck all use to them. Since the limits are “plucked out of the air”, the government may as well have launched a campaign to convince people of the existence of Santa.

However, there are some people who actually admit to the truth about these limts:

James Le Fanu, a family doctor in south London, said it would not be dangerous for a couple to drink slightly more than the recommended allowance, particularly if they only did so once or twice a week.

He said: "They are arbitrary levels and set low so as to catch as large a section of the population as possible and lecture them about their drinking levels. Mortality levels only begin to climb when you're hitting 50 or 60 units a week."

It is just a shame that James Le Fanu is “just” a family doctor, and therefore is likely to be ignored by the powers that be.

So to summarise, we have politicians complaining that middle class drinkers – private citizens with the right to chose how they live their lives – are exceeding made up, arbitrary limits of how much alcohol they can drink. I, for one, am glad that our politicians have a sense of perspective and are focussed on issues like made up alcohol limits rather than less pressing issues like the Iraq War, the economic melt-down and the possible bankruptcy of the UK.