MANY FOR THE ROAD

Licence to drink sensibly (The Telegraph, January 15th, 2005)

Perhaps it is our genes that prompt us, or perhaps the behaviour we observe in our parents. Perhaps it is the soggy climate of our island home. Whatever the explanation, there is something that makes many young Britons regard drunken oblivion as the pinnacle of pleasure.

We are not entirely alone in this: a cluster of other northern peoples exhibit the same tendency. Try explaining to an Italian, say, or a Spaniard that, instead of chatting up girls, Englishmen go out on Saturday nights in packs, drink themselves insensible and round off the evening with a good-natured fight. He will shake his head in bewilderment. A Finn or an Irishman, though, will have no problem with the concept. Nor will a Dane. As Hamlet says of his countrymen: "This heavy-headed revel east and west makes us traduced and tax'd of other nations. They clepe us drunkards."

Each of the stricken countries addresses the problem in its own way. Alcohol is so expensive in Norway that its people descend on Scotland each weekend. Sweden's off-licences are sparse and regulated, which drives Swedes to do their drinking on Baltic cruises. Iceland banned beer altogether until 1989. In England and Wales, the remedy has been to restrict licensing hours. It is therefore understandable that there should be anxiety about the Government's proposals to dismantle our traditional defence against inebriation. Critics fear that 24-hour opening will encourage drinking, and they are right.

We delude ourselves to pretend that eliminating closing time makes us Mediterraneans who can linger for hours over a glass of chianti in a café. We like to drink and, given the opportunity, we will drink more. That, though, is not a good enough reason for banning a consensual activity. In a free society, it ought to be possible to disapprove of something without trying to proscribe it.

Drunkenness may damage people's livers. It may make them ugly, boring or sluttish. But, provided they are adults, it is up to them to weigh these risks. Ah, say critics, but they aren't just harming themselves. They are closing our town centres through their violence and vomiting. True enough. But we should punish actual offences rather than a condition that may or may not lead to them: plenty of drunks are quiet and sentimental. In any case, the problem could hardly be made worse than it is now. Surely local councillors are in a position to decide whether longer opening hours are appropriate in their own patch. If their electors disagree, they can always vote for new councillors.

Give the Telegraph points for at least rejecting modern drivel about how increasing the availability of drink (or any vice) will reduce its appeal, or how we can all relax and await magic, market-driven solutions. Nor is there anything fundamentally wrong with local control, provided it is recognized that the potential for corruption would increase. Yet there is an unmistakable tone of surrender and fatigue underlying this libertarian argument that washes its hands of a social pathology under the guise of abstract freedom. Given that we know full well how alcohol can and does ravage families and sometimes whole communities, and how it interrelates with accidents, sickness, absenteeism, crime, other vices and pauperism, the argument is simply a walking away from any notion that there is something called a community to which we all owe common duties beyond the criminal law.

Alcohol abuse, like family law, is a messy business that ideology and principle will only go so far in solving before running up against new injustices and unintended consequences. The human condition is simply too varied and irrational to hope that any one regime will bring universal solutions, but, confronting this and believing only in airtight, logical answers, modern man despairs and prefers to cast the victims of vice into onto the scrapheap of history rather than be accused of moralism, just as he recoils from any suggestion that there is a common social stake in marriage. Indeed, looking at the debates over the drug wars, many today believe the libertarian case grows stronger the more widespread the use and abuse. Friend Andrew Nixon (known here as Brit) so argues on his new blog.

It is a modern article of faith that Prohibition was a failure, but it reduced American alcohol consumption by 50%. It was very popular among women for obvious reasons. The rub, of course, was that the fifty percent it did not eradicate became criminal in some way. Yet surely it is fallacious (and weak) to hold that the only choice is between a total ban and the free-for-all saloons of the old West. It is a strange world where the public is fixated on collective, abstract notions like the GNP, economic growth and law and order, but abjures any interest in the concrete individual behaviors that comprise them. The British government has completely abdicated its responsibility and served notice that it has no understanding of what constitutes a cohesive, resilient society.