The New Temperance Movement: When public health advocacy becomes prohibitionist
Where Victorian campaigners once spoke of moral depravity and sin, today's public health advocates frame their arguments in terms of disease prevention and societal harm. The language has changed, but the objective remains eerily familiar.
Temperance societies once urged working men to sign pledges renouncing spirits, modern charities promote Dry January and advocate for advertising restrictions. The tactics have evolved, the rhetoric has softened, but make no mistake: the new temperance movement is very much alive, and it represents a category-level threat to an industry which appears dangerously complacent about the scale of the challenge.
When Action on Smoking and Health recently called for alcohol to face the same regulatory treatment as tobacco, this is not merely mission creep from a health charity seeking relevance. It is a clear signal that the ground is shifting beneath the alcohol industry's feet. The organisation recently published a blog post arguing that alcohol advertising should be subject to the same online restrictions as vaping products, describing alcohol as "a glaring exception" to marketing controls. This is from an organisation whose very name suggests tobacco should be its sole concern.
ASH is far from alone. In January 2024, it joined forces with the Obesity Health Alliance and the Alcohol Health Alliance to publish "Holding Us Back: Tobacco, Alcohol and Unhealthy Food and Drink", a report calling for a unified government strategy treating these three product categories as essentially equivalent public health threats. The document advocates minimum unit pricing, increased taxation with automatic escalation mechanisms, and comprehensive restrictions on alcohol promotions and multi-buy deals. These are not the recommendations of organisations advocating responsible drinking. These are the demands of groups that view alcohol through the same lens as tobacco: as a harmful product that should be progressively eliminated from society.
The intellectual foundation for this approach comes directly from the World Health Organization, which declared in January 2023 that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. This represents a fundamental shift from previous guidance suggesting moderate consumption posed minimal risk. The WHO's position is that any alcohol consumption, regardless of amount, poses health risks, and when a product is reframed as inherently harmful, the question shifts from “how should it be regulated?” to “why does it exist at all?” Once that framing takes hold publicly, regulatory tightening becomes a matter of timing, not debate.
What makes this movement particularly potent is its institutional legitimacy. The Institute of Alcohol Studies, which openly acknowledges its roots in the United Kingdom Temperance Alliance, continues to receive primary funding from the Alliance House Foundation, the successor organisation to that 19th-century temperance movement. The connection represents a continuity of purpose across more than a century. The language may speak of "harm reduction" and "responsible drinking," but the policy recommendations consistently push towards ever-greater restriction.
The alcohol industry's response has been commendable but voluntary codes of conduct and responsible marketing standards won’t be sufficient to preserve their licence to operate.
These achievements are irrelevant when public health advocates adopt positions that no level of alcohol consumption is safe. Pregnancy warnings and unit labels become merely interim measures on the road to more comprehensive controls. The industry is bringing responsible marketing policies to a philosophical battle about whether alcohol should exist at all.
Consider the historical precedent. The original temperance movement in the UK, which emerged in the 1830s, progressed from moderation to prohibition. Today's neo-temperance movement follows a similar trajectory with different vocabulary. The industry believes the government would not dare impose such restrictions. Yet smoking was once ubiquitous before being progressively banned, stripped of advertising and made socially unacceptable. Once alcohol is defined as a carcinogen comparable to tobacco, the regulatory implications become identical: advertising bans, minimum pricing, and graphic health warnings.
This is how the Overton window shifts. Each incremental restriction becomes the baseline for the next. The process continues until prohibition by a thousand cuts achieves what explicit prohibition could not.
The decisive battles are not being fought in Parliament but in the slow consolidation of public assumptions. Responsible drinking campaigns operate within the frame set by opponents. Research on moderate consumption benefits is worthless when the opposing narrative defines away moderation. Education programmes concede that drinking requires extensive management.
The industry must recognise this is a fight, not a negotiation. Public health advocates pursue prohibition through incremental victories. Compromise is not a strategy when your opponent seeks your elimination.
If the “no safe level” framing becomes orthodoxy, traditional reputation management becomes insufficient. When the moral frame is settled in advance, reactive rebuttal rarely shifts the outcome.
The industry is preparing for regulation debates, while the real contest is over public meaning. Once alcohol is cognitively grouped with tobacco in the public imagination, each new restriction feels logical, inevitable even. Traditional reputation management is built to defend behaviour, not existence. By the time legislation reflects that shift, the argument has already been won elsewhere.
The new temperance movement has learned from history. It avoids explicitly calling for prohibition, knowing direct confrontation would fail. Instead, it pursues prohibition by degrees, using public health language to advance an agenda that would make alcohol as socially unacceptable and legally restricted as tobacco. The message is clear for anyone willing to see it.
The only question now is whether the alcohol industry will recognise the threat while there is still time to mount effective resistance, or whether it will continue its comfortable slumber until, like the tobacco industry before it, it wakes to discover its licence to operate has been legislated away one incremental restriction at a time.
The Victorian temperance movement ultimately failed to achieve prohibition in the UK. Its modern successor is playing a longer, smarter game. The real question is whether the industry recognises where the argument is being won.
