Let's stop right at the word 'new'

From the BBC 14 February 2011:

The number of admissions to hospital in the UK because of problem drinking could rise to 1.5 million a year by 2015, a charity says. Alcohol Concern estimates that it will cost the NHS £3.7bn annually if nothing is done to stop the increase... The charity says the number of people being treated in hospital for alcohol misuse has gone from 500,000 in 2002-3 to 1.1 million in 2009-10.

From The Metro 25 August 2011

The number of people treated in hospital every day for drink-related illnesses has risen by nearly half in just five years. In total, there were 1.1million admissions in England in 2009/10 – a rise of 879 a day, new research reveals... Prof Ian Gilmore, chairman of Alcohol Health Alliance UK, told Metro the figures showed the softly-softly policy of working with the drinks industry to combat alcohol abuse was not working.

So all we can glean from all this is that Alcohol Concern have been relegated and the Lib-Cons favoured fakecharity seems to be Alcohol Health Alliance UK* with PIG in charge. You'll note that the first article ends with a quote agreeing that 'something must be done' from an unnamed 'spokesperson for the Department of Health' but the second article ends with such a quote from an actual named 'Health Minister'.

* AHAUK is a super-fakecharity, the full list of its member fakecharities is here

UPDATE: Via Velvet Glove, how they manipulate and exaggerate the number of 'alcohol-related admissions' is explained here.

FakeCharities provide us all with a bit of welcome light relief

It's almost reassuring to see the same old idiots plough on with the same old lies, despite these having been debunked countless times. I bet Alcohol Concern and "researchers from Sheffield University" must be feeling a bit left out, as they weren't invited to provide rent-a-quotes.

From The Daily Mail:

The cost of treating people with liver disease, usually caused by excessive drinking, is expected to soar by 50 per cent in four years. A leaked Government report says the bill will reach £2.1billion – 2 per cent of the entire NHS budget. (1) Yet the stunning figure is only the tip of the iceberg, as it does not include alcohol-related cancer, accidents and injuries from violence...

The final bit of the article is textbook fakecharity:

Alcohol consumption in this country has soared over the past 30 years, (2) and more than 10million people regularly drink beyond safe levels. Last night a Department of Health spokesman said: "We have been working with partners to develop a Liver Strategy which we aim to publish later this year. The Government is also taking action to encourage responsible drinking and responsible alcohol sales, and will publish a new alcohol strategy soon." (3)

1) As against alcohol duty revenues which are forecast to reach £11.7 bn by 2015-16, to which you can add about £6 bn VAT.

2) That's a complete and utter f-ing lie, of course.

3) Who are these 'partners'? Would that be the people whom the government paid to ask the government to do what it intended to do in the first place? Like I say, this is textbook stuff.

The True Price Of A Pint (2)

I was tasked with freeing up a bit of space on our Freeview-recorder-box-thingy, and I watched that programme (a fair summary of which is here) one last time before deleting it for good.

The most outrageous claim they made was that 'alcohol consumption costs society £16.2 billion a year', and the most plausible one that people in the UK consume 52 billion units of alcohol a year.

But let's run with that £16.2 billion 'total cost' figure, which divided by 52 billion units = £0.31/unit. Beer duty happens to be 18.57p/unit (from HMRC, a unit = 10 ml alcohol), so - for example - beer duty on a pint (568 ml x 4% ABV) = 2.272 units x £0.1857 = £0.42.

That's just the beer duty though, what's the average price people pay for a pint? 60p for a 440 ml can in the supermarket = £0.77/pint and (say) £3/pint in the pub. The average must be about £1 (that's assuming 9 pints are drunk at home for every 1 in the pub), and out of that £1, 16.67 p is VAT, ergo total tax a on a pint is about £0.59 (£0.42 duty plus £0.17 VAT, stick on another fifth for PAYE on salaries of people working in breweries or alcohol retail, corporation tax etc) = £0.71, divide that by 2.272 = £0.31 tax/unit

£0.31 tax = £0.31 'total cost to society', problem solved.

And I'm pretty sure they didn't factor in the 'benefit to society' of all that boozing, which by definition is roughly equal to the total amount that people spend on booze, i.e. £23 billion*, which means that even by their reckoning, the net benefit to society is a princely £6 billion a year :-)

* 52 billion units ÷ 2.272 units/pint = 23 billion pints, again assuming cost/pint £1 each.

ITV: The True Price Of A Pint

I caught this programme just now (on ITV1 + 1) and, in case you were wondering, it was the usual heap of gibberish and fake statistics; they interviewed the usual suspects from Sheffield University; gave a lot of airtime to Professor Ian Gilmore; and cited 'research' by fakecharities like Alcohol Concern and the British Liver Trust as if it were Gospel.

The spokesmen for the British Retail Consortium and the Portman Group were total wimps. Instead of telling the interviewer: "There is no such thing as a binge drinking epidemic, now f- off" they played along with the charade and mumbled on about what they were doing to 'minimise the harm that alcohol does to society' and all that shit.

UPDATE: JH asks 'What is the true price of a pint?', well according to the programme, the cost of the 'harm to society' when you drink a pint of beer was a staggering 91p or something. They didn't even attempt to quantity that.