A majority of the Labour Ministers who took Office on 22nd January 1924 were temperance men.
The Chancellor Philip Snowden had published in 1908 Labour and the Drink Question and Labour’s 1923 Manifesto promised to bring the drink traffic under public control
The terminology is important-traffic not trade. Alcohol was seen as the same as hard drugs are now. The view was that drunkeness stopped workers from organising and changing the world- a bit.
There was substance in the point but another view might be that changing the world would reduce drunkeness.
Snowden was in a position to act in his April 1924 Budget. He didnt do much but what he did was firmly class based. He scrapped taxes on sweetened table waters- familiar to us today as flavoured water. He retained the tax on soda water taken to be used as a mixer with alcoholic drinks by the better off. A modest nod to the drinking habits of those amongst the working class who, like Snowden himself did not drink
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