Would you pay £8 for two-thirds of a pint?

I’ve just returned from my week-long annual pilgrimage to watch the Eurovision Song Contest and can confirm that this is the going rate for a Hansa or Ringnes in downtown Oslo, Norway.

What effect does this high alcohol taxation have?

It means that the Norwegians have a culture of drinking at home before deciding whether they will venture out at all to a pub, bar or club (they call this ‘vorspiel’ and ‘nachspiel’, or ‘before’ and ‘afterparty’). Therefore venues don’t really get busy until about midnight and the streets certainly seemed far less threatening than they can do in the UK.

The strongest alcohol is sold only in state-run shops (‘Vinmonopolet’) with restricted hours, the alcohol limit for driving is considerably lower than the UK and the police attitude to public drinking is also far less tolerant than in the UK, which all struck me as no bad thing, if a little ‘sledgehammer to crack a nut’.

The ingenious Eurofans keen not to miss a moment of the pubbing and clubbing opportunities on offer in Norway got around the new regime by carrying hipflasks filled with UK shop-bought alcohol with them thus also avoiding the crowds at the bar. (Another Norwegian solution to binge drinking appears to be to employ as few bar staff as possible but I can’t see this going down terribly well in the UK.)

For me, the high prices meant that however much I wanted to have a drink there really was only so much alcohol I could afford before my wallet was empty.

It seems obvious that just as the increasing cost of cigarettes in the UK has made a smoking habit almost prohibitively expensive, a similar logic could be applied to alcohol. No-one’s saying that alcohol should be banned but NICE’s positioning on minimum pricing is surely to be welcomed.

Cutting down on the effects of binge drinking on our streets has obvious social advantages but one thing we must be wary of is simply driving the problem behind closed doors.

Perhaps the government should consider investing some of the increased taxation it will reap from minimum alcohol pricing (because, trust me, it’s a revenue-generating opportunity I cannot see any UK government resisting) in educating people about the dangers of binge drinking  – whether in pubs, bar and clubs or at home? NICE’s suggestion that GPs should identify patients at risk of harm from alcohol abuse, however, seems to be placing far too much responsibility on their shoulders.