When will the anti-alcohol lobby stop lying about the ‘£21 billion’ cost of alcohol to society?

Yesterday a cross-party committee of MPs (working with the professional liars at Alcohol Concern, natch) demanded that health warnings become mandatory on alcohol labels in order to combat what they described as an ‘epidemic’ of alcohol related harm. It claimed the costs of alcohol abuse to society are “ever increasing”. It also said we need a minimum unit price for alcohol and that the drink drive limit should be lowered. 

There’s so much misleading rhetoric, distortion by omission and outright falsehood here it’s difficult to know where to start, but let’s have a go.

The urgent need to combat drink driving is particularly ironic given that another report published yesterday – which obviously didn’t get a fraction of the coverage that the anti-drink scaremongers did – reveals that drink driving deaths have just fallen to their lowest level since records began. 

This echoes the news last month that under age drinking has also fallen to the lowest level since records be