Somewhere in Britain, a group of 16-year-olds is taking sorrowful sips of Lucky Saint, worrying that their wild days of drinking 0.5% beer are numbered. The Government is minded to ban the nation’s 16 and 17-year-olds from accessing these mind-warping, alcohol-free substances.

“There is some evidence to suggest,” worried Health Minister Ashley Dalton in the Telegraph on Wednesday, “that exposure to alcohol products, even if no or low alcohol, can normalise drinking and become a gateway to alcohol consumption.”

It’s certainly worth entertaining the thought. I mean, imagine if we normalised drinking! What might that look like? Pubs and bars on every corner? Supermarkets selling Belgian ales, Argentine Malbec and Jamaican rum? Full-grown adults drinking wine with meals? Friends communing over Martinis? Perish the thought.

I’m not being entirely facetious. Dalton seems less worried about the pharmacological effects of the drinks themselves — given they contain as much alcohol as a banana — than their nefarious cultural influence. Early alcohol use initiation is “linked to a higher risk of harmful drinking patterns later in life”, according to Dalton, who is concerned about drinks that are “intentionally crafted to mimic traditional alcoholic drinks”. The 16- and 17-year-olds might get the taste for it, in other words. So presumably she will soon push to ban strawberries too, lest they form a gateway drug to Strawberry Rita Buzzballz.

What we really have here is the logic of vaping transposed: we must ban vaping because it resembles smoking, even if it largely avoids — and indeed mitigates — the harms of smoking. But vaping and drinking non-alcoholic beer are not analogous — just as cigarettes and lager (as nicely as they may go together) are wildly different things.

Smoking remains the world’s leading cause of preventable death, killing 7 million people a year including 1.6 million non-smokers who are exposed to the second-hand effects. The denormalisation of smoking through various interventions since the Nineties — after decades of concerted misinformation by the tobacco industry — has changed the culture and proved an enormous boon to public health. That’s why smoking bans are incredibly popular.

Alcohol has associated risks too — as do rock-climbing, playing bingo, driving, and shagging. But they are hardly comparable to those posed by smoking and must be offset by the fact that alcohol is much more deeply enmeshed in British culture. Alcohol is also a heritage industry, a source of togetherness, an antidote to loneliness, an economic lubricant. You could even adopt the nation-building approach of the French in the Thirties, when the wine industry successfully lobbied for watered-down wine to be served to schoolchildren with their steak haché — a practice that was only fully discontinued in 1981.

So let’s consider that culture as a large and multifaceted thing. Then let’s suppose that a significant number of 16- and 17-year-olds — dozens, even — do indeed consume Heineken 0.0% in British pubs on a regular basis. My suspicion is that the UK’s developed culture of teenagers slipping out to neck super-strength supermarket cider in parks might be a more significant factor in developing harmful habits than a line of alcohol-free beers.

What the clever brewers who have pioneered no/low alcohol brewing have done, with amazing success in recent years, is to normalise not drinking. According to the British Beer and Pub Association, 200 million pints of no/low beer were sold last year — up almost a fifth on 2024’s 170 million pints. The culture has adjusted — and it has been nothing but a gift to recovering alcoholics, pregnant women, devout teetotallers, those of us who just occasionally want a night (or a round) off and, indeed, children. And, you would think, those interested in the nation’s health.

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Richard Godwin is a freelance journalist who writes about culture, politics and technology

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