You have been warned!

Over the weekend, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Alcohol Misuse (which is basically a self-appointed collection of nanny staters with no official standing) issued a report calling, amongst other things, for the introduction of health warnings on alcoholic drink packages:

“Health warnings are a familiar and prominent feature on all tobacco products. Likewise, detailed nutritional labelling is ubiquitous on food products and soft drinks.

“Yet consumer information on alcohol products usually extends no further than the volume strength and unit content.

“In order to inform consumers about balanced risk, every alcohol label should include an evidence-based health warning as well as describing the product's nutritional, calorific and alcohol content.”

Note how, not for the first time, the treatment of tobacco is being used as a template for alcohol policy.

I have to say I start to suffer from “outrage fatigue” in response to stories like this – RedNev covers it in more detail here. However, some of the implications need to be considered. It somewhat surprisingly ignores the fact that the vast majority of bottles and cans already have health labelling as shown in the example above. However, the implication is that they want much more prominent warnings, on the front labels rather than on the back, and presumably large notices along the same lines to be displayed in pubs and bars where many drinks are not served from individual containers.

The claim is that this will be providing consumers with information about what they are drinking, but of course they have that information already and, in any case, surely nobody who is likely to be influenced by such warnings can have no idea that alcohol might be damaging to health if consumed to excess.

The drinks industry has always enjoyed a figleaf of respectability behind which it can say that it is not alcohol per se that is dangerous, just drinking too much of it. However, warnings of this kind will increasingly snip that away and instead at least imply an unequivocal message that any quantity is bad for you.

Now of course many people will cheerfully ignore these labels, but on the margins some will look at a bottle with a big notice on the front saying “This stuff is bad for you” and conclude it’s something they really should be avoiding. Who wants to sit there at a dinner party with a bottle displaying a picture of a diseased liver sitting in the middle of the table? It will be another drip, drip, drip effect deterring people from drinking at all – which of course is the intention in the first place. It is part of the process of denormalisation.