Middle-class drinkers should ignore advice on safe alcohol limits
Shocking to learn that the middle-classes take more drink and drugs than the poor. The Mail calls the report by the Social Metric Commission a “landmark” finding. Having discovered that people with more money and leisure time use more mind-altering substances than those with less money, we wonder what else the Mail has revealed?
In 2016, the Mail told readers: “Middle-class drinkers can get away with drinking MORE because their otherwise healthy lifestyles make up for it.” Adding: “Wealthier drinkers are less likely to smoke, be overweight and have a poor diet – traits more associated with the lower-income demographic.” Today Ian Duncan Smith, the Tory MP, says: “Part of impoverished adults drinking less is that they do not have the cash to spend on it.” The other part being, presumably, that huge taxes on drink affect the poor more than the wealthy. He doesn’t mention that. He also doesn’t mention why politicians of all stripes want to clamp down on cheap booze with minimum pricing (see: sin tax for people seen as too poor, too thick and too dependent to know what’s best for ’em). But he does say: “This is not in the report but my own experience is that where people are drinking or taking drugs in poverty, it is at a very serious addictive levels. For the middle-classes, they are holding down a job and doing what’s expected of them.” Which is to say: paying more taxes.
But the overriding message is that drinking in excess of the Government’s stated limits does you no harm at all. Indeed, in 2007, an insider said that the recommended weekly limit of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for women decreed by the Royal College of Physicians in 1987 was a guess. Former panel member Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, revealed to the Times: “So those limits were really plucked out of the air. They weren’t really based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee.”
The Mail‘s readerships is very much middle-class. But having told the middle-classes that drinking more makes no impact on their health, the Mail also says that it is a huge problem for the kind of so-and-sos who say ‘wine ‘o’clock’:
The talk is of “problem” drinking. The middle-class “culture of drinking at home is driving the problem”. And you can narrow it down still further to educated women:
It’s hard to work out what the point of all this bilge is. Perhaps it’s just a prelude to tax rises, moves to hike the price of booze for our own good – even if it it’s not doing the biggest payers any harm.
Posted: 17th, September 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Tabloids, The Consumer Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
