Booze and Britain

For as long as I care to remember, and probably beyond, the people of Great Britain have had a dangerous and obsessive love affair with booze.

If you visit any large British city on a Friday or Saturday evening, you will quickly realise that the ‘National Sport’ of Britain for many is to drink copious amounts of alcohol in a short space of time. Often resulting in the extreme loss of inhibitions and rational control, and leading to inane, dangerous and often shameful illegal behaviour.

This passion for drunkenness seems to have grown in the past 10 years, especially in the young of Britain, and has led to the tabloid media coining the phrase ‘Binge Drinking’ to describe this behaviour.

The plain and simple fact is that Great Britain has a Nation-wide issue with alcohol abuse by the young, and recently following pressure from police, health services and the general public, government officials finally had to acknowledge the existence of a problem.

To see this phenomena at its very worst you need only take a short plain ride to one of the Mediterranean resorts renowned for British drunkenness. From Southern Spain to the Islands of Greece, entire seaside holiday resorts have mutated to cater for the booze hungry Brits that come each summer for all night drinking binges that often include casual unprotected sex with strangers and violence between gangs of young men. Once a Med holiday resort gets a reputation in Britain for bars and nightlife, it will soon expand into a sprawling town incorporating hundreds of drinking holes and fast food joints, along with huge all night discos. Entertaining thousands of Britons every year.

The habitual behaviour of a Brit holidaying in such a resort is military like in organisation, constructed to maximise drinking capabilities. Sleeping takes place between 6am until about 2pm. Then down to the beach to eye up the opposite sex and obtain a suntan. Between 5pm and 7pm its time to find somewhere to eat your dinner. Because many Brits are creatures that crave home comforts there will be a multitude of ‘British’ pubs and restaurants serving home-style fayre, along with hundreds of fast food joints. Dinner consumed its back to the hotel to spruce yourself up. By 8pm you are hitting the first bar and wont see your bed again until dawn has broken.

The British have over the past 20 years developed a unique reputation amongst the natives of these warm Mediterranean countries. If you sit and talk to the locals they will tell you that the British are like no other nation when it comes to holidays. Its drink, sex and fast food all the way. Many locals are baffled by the amounts of alcohol consumed, and shocked by the levels of promiscuity and violence. Naturally, although often not the business of choice or preferred fate for these seaside towns, the locals will cater for this never ending booze thirst as it proves to be a lucrative business, despite all the drawbacks.

Back in old blighty Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Great Britain, and his government cabinet colleagues, are faced with not only the acceptance of this chronic problem, but also the hunt for a solution. I recently had first hand experience of a large British town centre after 10pm. I can inform you that being in that environment with my wife and child was an experience I would not repeat by choice. I was whiteness to violence, vomiting and sexual proposition in the short trip I made for essential medical supplies.

So after long and diverse discussion and debate in the House of Commons, a new law was finally passed to try and put an end to the undesirable environment created by ‘binge drinking’. The new law revolves around the concept that because British bars and pubs can only open for certain hours of the day, British drinker’s consume alcohol faster to get drunk before bars must close by law. The solution passed through the commons is to change the hour’s bars and pubs are licensed to open. Bars in Britain can now apply to get a license to open 24 hours a day. The idea behind this new law is two fold. First if the bars in your local town are open all night, there is no rush to get drunk before the infamous ‘closing time’ & last orders, so people can drink slower, or maybe even drink less in a more relaxed enviroment. Secondly, because all bars used to all close at the same time, all the drunken people leaving them poured out onto the streets at the same time, creating an environment of violent and extreme behaviour. As a knock on effect it is also hoped that going overseas to drink all night will become less of a novelty for Britons. Because all night drinking will be available within Britain, and thus the over exertions of all night drinking, sex and violence by Brits on holiday will become less frequent.

So far it’s early days in the new environment created by these new laws. Only a handful of bars and pubs have been granted the all night licenses, but police are already reporting a fall in ‘anti-social’ drunken behaviour.

There is no doubt that in Britain it has long been a tradition to work hard all week, then get to Friday night and party hard too. I don’t think anyone would begrudge the people of Britain, young or old, a good time and freedom of expression. However when it makes our Town and City centres ‘no go areas' and puts a huge strain on our police and medical services it is not acceptable. If this new law begins to reverse the recent tide in extreme and undesirable behaviour, the people of Britain may yet again be able to enjoy their city centres at night once more.

American Chronicle