Anybody who was shocked to see respectable Surrey top of the “hazardous drinking” table has never lived in the suburbs.

Runnymede, the Surrey borough where I grew up (in the Black Prince, New Haw) at last won national recognition when it topped the table with 26.4 per cent of adults deemed hazardous drinkers. Next-door Woking, where I was educated at grammar school and grotty pubs, is just behind with 25 per cent. By contrast Walthamstow in northeast London, where I live now, is third from bottom, at 15.3 per cent. Some of us try to keep our end up, but I fear that our Muslim neighbours are not pulling their weight in the drinking stakes.

Of course people drink in those dull suburbs. There is little else to do for pleasure or escape. Growing up in the Seventies, we were constantly bored to beers. Today many of our more mature vintage stay home and drink wine, enjoying the fruits of relative prosperity. One thing that has changed is that women drink more these days. It’s called equality.

Now, however, the health crusaders are targeting these “middle-class drinkers”, on the befuddled pretext that it is “hazardous” for a woman to drink more than five large glasses of wine a week, or a man more than seven. If they were drinking that amount in one session and then speeding the wrong way around the M25, the whiners might have a point.

This is less about improving the health of our bodies than ensuring we have “healthy minds”. One expert behind this week’s report cautioned that regular drinking could lead to “behavioural issues”. Dawn Primandproper, the Health Minister, announced that our persistent social drinking “has to change”. The authorities now assume that it is their job to change our behaviour and make us conform to their model of upright sober citizens.

Some may think that new Labour is locked into a spiral of self-destructive behaviour, so intoxicated by the smell of its own righteousness that it has moved on from bashing youthful binge drinkers to attacking its target voters in middle England. But why shouldn’t new Labour get away with it? After all, even my old friends on the Left tend to turn a blind eye to such antisocial behaviour by the Government, if it acts in the name of the war on alcohol or obesity rather than the War on Terror.

Warning: persistently swallowing health panics can be hazardous to the body politic.

We were officially told this week that obesity is as big a threat as climate change. Not long ago we were told that global warming is as big a threat as terrorism. And earlier, that terrorism is as big a threat to the British people as the Second World War. So: child obesity = global warming = terrorism = Fascism. Ergo, those crisps in your child’s lunchbox are today’s moral equivalent of the Nazis. Now do you feel guilty?

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