CORRESPONDENT Tony Sprason (March 26) hit the nail on the head when he suggested that the Government has dragged its feet in response to binge drinking.

It begs the question: what has the Government been doing the past seven years?

Visit almost any city centre on a weekend evening, or even Holcombe Brook on Good Friday, and it should be blindingly obvious that young people in Britain have a drink problem. But that is too simple an approach for New Labour. Expert working parties have to be assembled, task forces deployed, reports commissioned, statistics pored over, and policies formulated.

Home Office minister Ms Hazel Blears is already busying herself with these preparations and by the end of the year, she says, she hopes to launch a "national strategy" to tackle binge drinking. How will this work I wonder? A ban on alcohol advertising on television and in newspapers? Pint glasses carrying health warnings? Surgeons calling time on people who have fallen over blind drunk? Or perhaps an army of council-employed outreach workers could be despatched to pubs, urging people not to join the scrum for last orders.

Whatever the strategy, it will doubtless require the employment of a huge number of taxpayer-funded busy-bodies to tell people how not to ruin their lives with drink. The total sum of their efforts is unlikely to have much impact, however.

Just as the multi-million pound national strategy to cut truancy levels has been a costly failure, so too will the national drinking strategy. Why? Because the problem cannot be cured by government edict or by any number of well-intentioned co-ordinators.

It will only be cured when people re-discover the old-fashioned virtues of moderation, self-restraint, self-respect, neighbourliness, and a concern for others. This can only happen if the so-called role models of today, whether sporting gods or pop and film stars, begin to act in a way which upholds and honours these virtues, rather than mocks them.

JEAN ALLISON (Mrs),

Ramsbottom.