Introduction

This chapter explores the ways in which drinking and drink epitomise the deep paradoxes inherent in efforts to govern consumption, especially in the UK, where alcohol has risen inexorably up government agendas since 1997. New Labour's efforts to both tackle alcohol-related harm and, at the same time, to reinvigorate city and town centres was underpinned by a drive to create and promote a ‘new sensible drinking culture’ (Department of Health 2007: 5) as part of the strong faith the government placed in the paradigm of both cultural and behaviour change (Cabinet Office 2004, 2008) discussed in Chapter Three. Historians of intoxication have clearly shown that the nation's drinking habits have long been of episodic concern to the British government (Kneale 1999; Berridge 2006; Plant and Plant 2006; Kneale and French 2008); however, the hysteria (that remains even after the departure of Labour from office) over the pervasive role of alcohol in British society appears to be qualitatively different from earlier incarnations. At root, the question of how and why alcohol has emerged as a significant contemporary ‘problem’ in the UK is inextricable from the manner in which quantitative shifts in consumption have occurred alongside qualitative upheavals in the social mores that serve to normalise drinking practices. Moreover, they reflect a growing appreciation that – just as with obesity – ‘the issue comes down to the balance that a society chooses between a free market in alcohol products and regulation to limit the harm they cause’ (The Guardian 2010).

Policy, media and academic studies of drink and drinking tend to focus on either the political economy of alcohol or its harms and costs. Only rarely do they pause to interrogate the points of intersection between these: the locations – both physical and psychological – where rights, responsibilities and freedoms meet in the creation of the sensible drinker.