The rise and fall (and rise and fall) of neoliberalism in alcohol policy?

Between 2006 and 2009, I was doing research into alcohol and the night-time economy.  This still felt like a time of ‘peak booze’.  The new licensing laws had come into force in 2005, and it wasn’t yet clear that our drinking had started to decline at a population level.  Generation sensible was nowhere to be seen as the papers panicked (and gawped) at ‘Binge Britain’.  Urinating on memorials isn’t a new thing.

A dominant debate at this point (which fortunately for my attempts at academic publishing continued under the Coalition government) was about the relevance of the idea of ‘neoliberalism’.  I’ve wrote about this quite often (particularly here – or here for free), including on this blog.  In my understanding, neoliberalism in alcohol policy is about having your cake and eating it: liberalising regulations, but then complaining when things unfold exactly as other have predicted.

Words and concepts that are valued in this understanding include ‘market’, ‘rational’, ‘individual’, ‘responsible’.  Some of the best descriptions of neoliberalism can be found in the work of David Garland and John Clarke.

It’s not classical liberalism, because you’re not accepting that a person’s own choices about their own life are by definition the most sensible for them.  But it’s not the classic post (First World) war consensus approach, because you’re not changing the environment to re-shape people’s choices.  (Don’t imagine that Thaler and Sunstein were the first people to think about choice architecture and nudging people towards healthier choices – alcohol policy reports were talking about food offers, glass size and vertical drinking in the 19^th century, and putting this into practice by the early twentieth).

Paul Chatterton and Robert Hollands used a very helpful model to structure discussions of alcohol policy – think about consumers, producers and regulators.  Their focus was on public drinking – or the ‘night-time economy’, and so producers, of course, could be the people who actually brew the beer, for example, or the retailers who sell it (like nightclubs); they’re both ‘producing’ the night-time economy space.

A neoliberal approach by ‘regulators’ (i.e. local and national government) could be characterised by a tendency to blame individuals for behaving poorly, while freeing up the producers to make alcohol more available and affordable.  A contrary interpretation would be claim that those changes mean that young people are ‘invited to binge’, and so the blame should lie with regulators and producers for being irresponsible and disingenuous.  This was an academic debate as well as one of policy and politics – that phrase ‘invited to binge’ comes from an exchange in the journal Town and Country Planning from 2004.

I feel like these debates have largely faded away in politics recently.  Perhaps this is because I’m not in academia now, so I’m not analysing politics and policy as much as experiencing them through local government.  It’s also a function of Brexit blocking out all other issues.  But there’s something more: alcohol isn’t the political issue it was in 2004.  (Or at least it wasn’t until recently.)  We’ve had our debate about licensing, ‘binge Britain’ is perhaps less visible, and minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol has effectively been framed as an issue of devolved governments, with Scotland and Wales introducing it, rather than something to be argued over at Westminster.  (It’s hard for the Conservatives to oppose it too much, as they committed to it in their 2012 Alcohol Strategy.)

But now these debates about ‘responsibility’ are back, brought into focus again by COVID-19.  The photos of people on beaches – and particularly drinking in Soho – have led to discussions of whether it’s irresponsible drinkers, greedy producers or negligent regulators who are to blame.

Suddenly, I thought, those ideas of neoliberalism and alcohol policy might be valid again: the economy needs a boost, and people need the distraction that a good night out can give.  And having evidence that some groups (possibly unlikely to vote for them in any case) may not have adhered to guidelines may not be the worst thing for a government preparing for a ‘second wave’.

Perhaps one difference this time round might be local authorities, I thought.  Rather than embracing the night-time economy as a way to re-create Bologna in Birmingham and Madrid in Manchester (and raise much-needed revenue), this time round, perhaps influenced by their Directors of Public Health, it seemed like drinking in a time of COVID-19 might case them a headache.

But fundamentally, we were straight back into these age old debates of whether we should trust people to make ‘sensible’ decisions (and blame the ‘irresponsible minority’ when they don’t), or be more pragmatic and controlling and re-shape the environment to actively encourage (or even enforce) ‘responsible’ drinking.

Then came yesterday’s budget – sorry, ‘Plan For Jobs’.  In this, the VAT cut and ‘meal deals’ announced by the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, explicitly did not include alcoholic drinks.  This will boost some pubs and venues, and not others.  This seems to be the result of an acceptance that consuming alcohol during lockdown may be an issue, but it is distinctly at odds with the divide and rule approach of New Labour, as outlined by Tessa Jowell in proposing the 2003 Licensing Act: “Our role is to give adults the freedom they deserve, while giving the yobbish minority the rough and tough treatment that they deserve.”

This is the same approach I thought I was seeing in the government’s approach to re-opening the pubs, and the public reaction to scenes in Soho and elsewhere.

Perhaps, as with the claim to be drawing on FDR’s New Deal, there is a tension within government.  Maybe this is Rishi Sunak positioning himself as responsible centrist, interested in rules, as opposed to the neoliberal individualism of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson.  But given that it’s Michael Gove talking about FDR, this could simply be a case of the government having an interest in presenting (trialling?) a range of approaches.

Whatever it is, it seems a good time to be dusting off all those references from the 1990s and 2000s.  I’ve written before about the false dawn of some kind of communitarianism or post-liberalism – at least in relation to alcohol policy.  In fact that was my first published article going over these arguments about neoliberalism.  And the Coalition never did introduce MUP.