Sober Britain

With young people drinking less, is Britain gradually becoming a non-drinking country?

The people of these islands were once famous for their drinking. A Frenchman writing in the 12th century described the various races of Europe: “the French were proud and womanish; the Germans furious and obscene; the Lombards greedy, malicious, and cowardly; and the English were drunkards and had tails.” It’s hard to argue with that. In 1742 at the height of the gin craze that Hogarth immortalised in ‘Gin Lane’, the English were drinking on average the equivalent of 20 bottles of gin per person per year. But today the younger generation are letting the side down. According to Drinkaware charity something like a quarter of the 16 to 24 don’t drink at all. 

It’s a far cry from when I was growing up, there wasn’t much else to do than sit in the park drinking cider, smoking Benson & Hedges and waiting until we looked old enough to go to the pub. In one study of 517 young British people by the universities of Kent and Leeds, seven out of 10 cited more recreational opportunities as the reason why they weren’t drinking. Nowadays, there’s a world of entertainment online and rather than go in search of sex in sticky-floored suburban nightclubs called Kudos or Visage, they can go on Tinder and swipe to find the ideal partner. Meanwhile stricter enforcement of underage drinking means that the under 18s can’t go to such places even if they wanted to. Clublife is dying anyway, a victim of ever more restrictive late night licencing regulations.

There’s a mental health element to abstinence too. According to Google research from 2019 41% of Gen Zers associate alcohol with “vulnerability” and “anxiety” and 60% associated alcohol with loss of control. That’s precisely why we were doing it but who would want to get hammered today with the ubiquity of camera phones and the ever-present possibility of online disgrace? Alcohol is seen as unhealthy; many of the children of friends I know would rather go to the gym than Wetherspoons. Teenagers look different to when I was young, they’re better groomed, with better teeth and skin. They want to look good for social media.

You also can’t deny there’s a cyclical element to this abstinence, the younger generation rebelling against the hedonism of their parents. Who wants to be like their boozy old dad? But alcohol is also a lot more expensive these days. A pint in London can top £6, I remember when £2.50 was normal and salaries haven’t doubled in 20 years. According to an article on the BBC website: “the amount you pay for a night out is now increasing at its fastest rate since 1991.” Combine that with rocketing rents and it’s no wonder that Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, are going out and drinking less.

Worryingly, at least for Britain’s booze industry, it’s not just young people. Since a peak in 2004 average alcohol consumption measured in litres of pure alcohol per year has declined. Data just released from Nielsen shows that traditional Christmas drinks like port, champagne and spirits were down on this time last year. And to make things worse, Dry January, introduced as recently as 2013 though it feels like it has been around forever, has become a fixture with nine million people saying that they are taking part this year. Even if most of them won’t make it for the whole month, that’s a lot of lost sales. It’s been joined by all kinds of other fasting months like Stoptober, Veganuary and Prune June, keeps you regular. Ok, I made the last one up.

To cash in on this potential market, you can buy non-alcoholic ‘spirits’ like Seedlip or Tanqueray 0.0% that cost as much as gin but don’t contain any alcohol. You’re essentially paying £20 for water that tastes faintly of peas. These have proved popular with bars which can charge proper cocktail prices for mocktails but the jury is very much out on whether the public is fully on board. An ex-Tesco employee described such products as ‘all push and no pull’; they’re being pushed by big drinks conglomerates like Diageo but the demand isn’t there from customers. He said that you should look at the dust on displays of such drinks in supermarkets - they’re not exactly flying off the shelves.

Alcohol-free beer, however, has become a fixture. Since 2019 sales of such beers have doubled according to the British Beer and Pub Association. No pub nowadays would dare not stock Adnams Ghost Ship or Erdinger Alkoholfrei. There are even bars that only sell non-alcoholic drinks and not just in Brighton. 

Companies like Diageo and Pernod Ricard are moving into alcohol free as their traditional customer base is ageing - teetotalism is least prevalent among people in the 55-74 age bracket. You can see the increasing desperation of whisky brands to be down with the kids in adverts featuring groovy multiracial youngsters rather than their actual customers, middle-aged men called Colin. I received a press release recently describing a new whisky from an established producer as “the ultimate flex for those reaping and celebrating the successes of their hustle.” No, me neither. They’re also pushing modern day alcopops, made with less sugar and rebranded as ‘hard seltzers’, without much success it has to be said. 

With its customers dying off, the industry is pushing for ‘premiumisation’. With fewer customers, those that are left will have to pay more. This means that everything from the pint in the pub to single malt whiskies have increased, in the latter case dramatically (pun not intended). So on one hand the drinks industry is trying to be down with kids but at the same time bumping up prices when the cost of living is soaring. 

Now there are signs that economic realities are finally hitting home. This year, after a long boom, sales of Scotch whisky were down 20% globally. Meanwhile wine has been stagnant for years with only prosecco and rosé seeing serious growth in Britain. According to trade journal Meininger’s International only 49% of the population regularly drink wine, 10% lower than 2015’s figures. My parents were the Elizabeth David generation discovering the joys of French country wines and they passed it onto their children but young people aren’t picking up the wine habit in the same way. If the British wine trade is spooked, then over in the US there’s a definite air of panic as the creeping legalisation of cannabis has put a major dent in sales. Rather than pour a glass of Californian merlot to take the edge of the day many people are taking edible marijuana. 

Over here the real losers have been pubs. Since 2000 Britain has lost over 13,000 pubs, a quarter of the total, and the rate of closures is increasing. They’ve been hit hard by the lingering effects of Covid lockdowns, stricter drink driving laws and changes in lifestyle which mean that there’s far more for people to do than visit their local. There are echoes of the 1930s when Britons were consuming less than half the amount of beer they had 50 years before. Going to the pub had competition from horse racing, football, jazz dances and most of all the cinema. Replace these with mobile phones and vaping and you have some idea of where we are today. There was even a pre-war trend for milk bars - the zero ABV bars of their day.

Just as in the inter-war period, prohibitionism is on the rise except now it’s in the name of public health rather than morality. In 2016 recommendations for drinking levels were lowered to 14 units for men and women in Britain. A recent study from the WHO stated that there was no safe level for alcohol consumption despite numerous studies that have shown that in small quantities alcohol can be beneficial to our health. Moderate drinkers are 25% less likely to die from coronary heart disease than teetotallers.  But the benefits of drinking isn’t something the alcohol industry represented by bodies like the Wine and Spirits Trade Association (WSTA) or the Portman Group is prepared to promote. Instead it is fighting a losing battle in enemy territory. While campaign groups bandy around inflated figures about the cost to the NHS and society in general which ignore the huge amount of money the government takes from alcohol duty. 

We’re a long way from ‘Gin Lane’. These days Britain isn’t even in the top ten of booziest nations in Europe and yet groups like Institute of Alcohol Studies are taking a leaf out of the anti-tobacco handbook and pushing for ever stricter control like plain packaging. The aim is to ‘denormalise’ alcohol consumption. Ireland is already planning warnings on bottles in 2026. Despite the lack of success of its minimum pricing, problem drinking did not decrease, the Scottish government is planning to push ahead with ever stricter control of alcohol marketing which could see Scotch whisky, the country’s biggest export, become practically invisible. No more alcohol sports sponsorship or even window displays in whisky shops in case children see and are tempted to drink. None of this will help the minority who have a serious drink problem. 

Mankind’s need for intoxication isn’t going to go away. When Pakistan went for full alcohol prohibition in the 1970s, believe it or not Karachi was famous for its nightlife, young people turned to heroin. As T.S Eliot wrote: “mankind can only take so much reality.” The risk with neo-prohibitionism and teetotalism is that we could be throwing away our infrastructure of sociable controlled intoxication in pubs, bars and restaurants. The sort of places where we can meet people and random encounters can happen, where young people can dance, flirt and laugh. In other words, civilization. 

The cheap pint of beer in a local pub or the bottle of wine imported from that funny little chap in the south of France can’t exist without a lively drinking culture to support them. If we’re not careful we might find that that alcohol will either be a luxury, or something bought from the supermarket and the only place to drink it is in the home.  So come on young people, have a drink or two, responsibly, of course. 

A shorter version of this article appeared in the 20 January issue of the Spectator.