Don’t Let The ‘Saving Lives’ Mob Kill the Country Pub

In 2023 alcohol was a factor in 34% of road deaths, which surely means 66% were caused by sober people. Excuse my little joke. But as I have your attention, please consider a couple of serious points. We need to stop activists weaponising the term ‘saving lives’, and then we need to debate whether reducing the drink driving limit is worth it if it kills the country pub, amongst other things.

My nearest country pub is 13 miles away. This is rural North Devon so there are no tubes, buses or Ubers; in fact, I rarely see another car when I drive there and back. I drive home within the 80mg limit. If that limit drops to 50mg, I won’t go. I doubt anyone else will either. An hour’s round trip for one pint, forget it. The country pub will die.

This will be tragic for rural communities. Our country pub sits high up on Exmoor, alone in the wilderness, hundreds of years old. It is exactly what you would expect. Stone floors, a log fire, a ghost, completely ignored by ‘progress’, it has no mains electricity, gas or water, and no internet, no TV screens and no canned music; social media here is each other. It is paradise. To survive, the publican needs to make £100 margin a day. Add in a pittance wage, cleaning, heating, repairs and other variable costs and that doubles to £200. Are you thinking ‘not much?’ That’s 100 pints that must be sold to people who all have to drive to get there, and, because we depend on our licence, we follow the helpful advice of MAJ Law which is that someone who is 5’ 9” and 13 stone can have two pints of 3.4% beer in an hour (preferably a little longer) and stay under the limit. The brutal maths of this is that the pub needs 50 customers (a day) to drink two pints each. That’s why we hold debate night on Mondays. We usually get 10 or so peasants, farmers, tradesman etc. At two pints each that’s only 20 pints so it only generates a £40 contribution but that £40 a week is £2,000 a year. Losing it would be fatal. Pub economics are that marginal. If we reduce the legal driving limit to 50mg (one pint) the pub will be empty every night, not just Mondays. What would that mean? Think back to Cannery Row where Steinbeck reminds us that the first beer slakes the thirst of a hard day’s work and the second relaxes people into the warmth of human fellowship. Without a second there also won’t be a first.

‘So what?’ the activist zealots will say, ‘we are saving lives, you can’t put a price on saving lives.’ There it is. The emotional blackmail they learn at Gramsci school (university). If you question them, they jump straight to the murder card. My first experience of this was when asking if there might be a category of woman who does not have a penis. I was screamed at, “It’s people like you who are responsible for trans people being attacked and killed.” I was pretty certain I wasn’t so when I asked if we could discuss the subject more calmly, I was screamed at again, even louder: “Don’t tone police me, I have a right to be angry, people are dying.”

We must do something about this or every argument will be lost before it begins as they bang the ‘saving lives’ gong. In the hope of saving the nation’s country pubs let’s consider how to deal with death ranting.

To put death into context, a few years ago I was at a medical conference on preventative medicine where we were discussing the compulsory prescription of statins. This would ‘save’ about 7,000 lives a year, according to the BMJ.  The speaker who was on before me was the head of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE). He looked gravely at the assembled doctors and said: “I’ve got some important news for you. [Pause] You are all going to die.” He was making the valid point that even in spoilt rich Western societies with infinite safety, health and welfare provisions organised by experts and lobbied by activists, death is coming to everybody. If you work at NICE you are used to being death-ranted. NICE has the job of stopping the NHS disappearing down the economic plughole of Big Pharma. It applies a limit of about £20,000-30,000 a year of life saved for medical treatment. Imagine the emotions that NICE faces from people who are denied ‘life-saving’ drugs that cost more than £30,000 a year. But remember, they are not so much lives ‘saved’ as lives extended. We will all die one day and society does not have a bottomless credit card, except for Covid which was not a medical emergency at all but was when the progressive ‘life-saving’ hit its peak by claiming that 400,000 people would die without lockdowns. Blackmailed by Professor Ferguson, the government caved in and spent £80 billion in Covid furloughs and bounce-back loans to save those lives. That worked out at £195,000 per ‘life saved’, although post Covid analysis suggests the ‘real’ number of lives saved was much lower, somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000, which would put the price per life saved at somewhere between £500,000 and £1.5 million, or much, much more than the normal £30,000 cap applied by NICE. Politicians tried to hold this back but the emotional blackmail was irresistible.

With this in mind, if a road safety zealot from Brake (for instance) would let me speak without accusing me of murder, I would respectfully agree that road traffic accidents are indeed gruesome and tragic, especially when innocent people are involved. But in a fair and sensible society we should rationally consider the negative impact of their proposal and look at alternative ways to save lives (if that is our priority), especially before introducing laws that carry harsh penalties for violating a legal limit without causing any harm.

I’ve already mentioned that we could potentially save 7,000 lives a year by encouraging or compelling people to take statins. That is a minor life-saving gig compared to obesity and Type 2 diabetes which are estimated to kill more than 30,000 people a year. This is also a horrible, painful, cruel way to go, often leading to loss of mobility, amputations, blindness and large organ failure. The majority of these deaths can be prevented or delayed by laws that control the distribution of unhealthy food and drink, or that compel overweight people to lose weight (like the Metabo laws in Japan). Yet, under pressure from road safety activists, the government is ignoring these lives and prioritising reducing drink driving limits.

Bearing this in mind, what is the risk from traffic accidents and death on UK roads? How does the number of road deaths compare to the 37,000 deaths a year that can be avoided by taking action on statins and obesity? In 2023 road accidents accounted for 1,645 of the 568,000 people who died in the year. In terms of deaths per miles travelled, the UK’s roads are relatively safe. The UK is usually the third safest in Europe. Breaking this down further, “driving while impaired or distracted”, which includes drug driving as well as playing with your phone, is classified as the fourth most common factor in fatal accidents. In 2023 alcohol might have been a factor in 34% of road deaths (560). Let me repeat again that every death is tragic, but let me also repeat the lesson from my fellow speaker from NICE: “We are all going to die.”

Which brings us to the big question, how many lives a year will be saved by reducing the drink drive limit from two pints (normal strength) in an hour to one pint? Obviously, there is no large sample, double blind, randomised control trial that has produced reliable evidence to answer this but highly qualified experts have made guesses by comparing England and Wales with Scotland which has operated a lower limit since 2014.  

According to the NIHR there was no reduction in the first two years after it was introduced.

A report by the Professor Alsop in 2015 suggested the answer would be 25 lives saved a year.

Reports by bodies that are involved in campaigning suggest it could be as high as 300. Surely, this is unlikely. The new limit will not deter the massively drunk driver who does not worry about the legal limit. It is aimed at the millions of people who, like me, are extremely unlikely to do harm to anyone while staying within the 80mg limit. All we can say before we embark on this draconian policy is that the number of ‘lives saved’ will be somewhere between 0 and 300 out of a total 568,000 people who die a year, each one of which is tragic.

As already explained, lowering the limit will kill the few country pubs that we still have left. Since reducing the limit, Scotland has lost pubs at an even faster rate than England and Wales. So what? ‘What’ will be another blow to rural communities who have suffered decades of neglect and persecution. Planning policy in the UK has driven families out of country villages. There are few village schools now. Health services have centralised. There is no public transport. Few villages have a viable shop or post office and we depend on private car ownership, which is outrageously expensive for people on low rural wages.

At the same time, farming is now highly mechanised, leaving farmers working under all that pressure (much worse under Labour) in solitary isolation. Within three miles of my home (population less than 500) four have committed suicide since 2015. In recent years somewhere between 60 and 100 farmers have committed suicide a year. Even so, I would never scream at a drink driving campaigner, ‘By forcing pubs out of business you are increasing the risk of suicide and therefore that makes you a murderer.’ I am not claiming pubs ‘save lives’, but they are a vital place for rural communities to experience social interaction and community wellbeing.

And, when those few remaining pub doors are boarded up because of the one-pint limit, it will hit our struggling rural tourist economy. Who wants to camp in a field for a week with nowhere to go for even one pint and a chat?

Of course, I agree that any death is a tragedy. I have grieved over road deaths as others have. But I sincerely hope Government will look beyond emotional blackmail and take the wider effects into account. Evidence suggests lowering the limit will not save lives but it will kill pubs. Surely, we can at least have a calm, rational grown-up debate without being called murderer.

Ken Charman is a North Devon resident, FSU member and Land Rover driver (real one).