BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Switchboard >

Drinking In Britain

  
  

Page: (1)2

 
 
Alex's Grandma
10:16 / 21.11.04
From today's Observer;

Government research shows that 44 per cent of violent crime is alcohol related and that 70 per cent of hospital admissions at the weekends are associated with drinking

Among various other horror statistics that the UK papers have been full of lately.

Pointing the finger here would be not that germane ( the beam in my eye, the mote in everyone else's, all that, ) but it's also hard to argue with those as statistics. So is Britain's drinking out of control ? Living in central-ish London, I don't suppose I notice it so much, but it seems that in a lot of the UK the simple act of going out for a swift half over the weekend is something akin to heading into a war zone, or some kind of river of vomit and blood.

So is this just scare-mongering ? And if not, what's the problem ( Something endemic in British culture ? Something new, to do with Oasis, football and Zoo magazine ? The fault of the breweries, alcopops, happy hours, superpubs and so on ? ) and whatever it is how can it be dealt with, if that's even possible ? And are the proposed measures to relax the licensing laws going to alleviate the situation, or make it worse ? I mean I like the idea of being able to go to the pub at half One in the morning every now and again, but not if that means even longer lines at Casualty on a Saturday night.
 
 
Nobody's girl
10:52 / 21.11.04
I think we have a problem with drinking in Britain.
Every job I've ever had, I have to explain to incredulous colleagues that I'd rather spend my evenings at a good movie than get completely rat-arsed in some sordid meat-market. Workmates treat me like a Martian for my preference, but I think they're the crazy ones.

Living in the centre of town I hear the fights, am disturbed by the drunken wankers singing at top volume, stumble over the unsavoury alleyway fucking and am greeted on a Sunday morning by the disgusting aftermath of vomit and assorted debris.

It's almost like an obligation to go out and get pissed of a weekend and I resent the hell out of it, I simply fail to see the attraction.

What's to be done? Excess drinking needs to be exposed for the incredibly destructive force it really is.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
11:35 / 21.11.04
All the above statistics, yet alchohol is legal and weed is not... makes you wonder who's interest that's in.

In my expereience, most of the violence/danger that drinking brings happens not in the bars and clubs themselves but on the street outside when all said bars/clubs start chucking out. It makes sense to allow them to close much later so that people leave gradually and not in a huge, pissed up/off group.
 
 
neukoln
12:01 / 21.11.04
I think we have a problem with drinking in Britain.

I don't understand *why* there is a problem here though. Why does Britain have this problem, whilst other countries don't have it to the same degree? It would appear that there is a whole suite of problems here of which excessive drinking is but one of them. Britain has become a nation of excessive eaters as well, with obesity approaching distressing levels.

It seems to me that it is a problem to do with self-restraint? But how/where do we learn self-restraint? Is this something that comes from the home, or is it culturally determined, or an education issue? I am interested too to know why people who live in Britain (esp those born here) and don't choose to binge drink/eat, don't. What makes them different?
 
 
Loomis
15:35 / 21.11.04
I think we need to be careful not to demonise alcohol (or pot or food or anything else) as the cause of society's problems. For every binge drinker who starts fights there are a hundred who don't. It might be more constructive for the government to look at why so many people feel angry and isolated, and feel that they have no control over their lives because they're being fucked over by society in a lot of ways, and they turn to violence and macho behaviour as a way to assert control over their environment in one small way.

Obviously alcohol decreases inhibitions and can be a way to bring these tensions to the surface, but plenty of people within and without Britain get drunk (or take other drugs or eat lots of food, etc.) without causing trouble for themselves or others. I don't think doing a Blunkett is the way forward.
 
 
w1rebaby
16:12 / 21.11.04
On the one hand I am aware of the problem of drunken arseholes, though living in London means that you at least have the option of picking and choosing your drinking environments to avoid such arseholes and thus minimising the risk to yourself. But it would be nice for people not to get pissed up and shout all night, wee in various places and start fights.

On the other hand I am buggered if I'm going to participate in yet another New Labour moral crusade. It's one of those situations where one may seem to agree, but in fact your motivation and the government's motivation differ, and because of that if you see any common ground you have to be very careful not to let them go any further than strictly necessary. (I'm reminded of MMR - I am of the opinion that it is not significantly harmful or at least better than getting M, M or R, but the government would have said that *anyway*.) This is social control legislation, and about distracting the populace from real underlying problems and issues. The ridiculous definition of "binge drinking" (as I understand it, more than two pints at one time) rather goes to show this, as does the imagery used by the government and the press - drunken yobs wreaking havoc, working class of course or the odd class traitor.

I'm not aware personally of this problem having got much worse over the time period that I've been socially involved in the boozeosphere, and I'd be very surprised if before my time alcohol-abetted violence really didn't exist. I'm very loath to golden-age on the issue of crime, particularly given that attitudes to various actions have changed anyway so many things wouldn't have been reported.

As Loomis says, I think the sensible thing to do would be to examine *why* people feel the need to get fucked off their faces so much. I'd hazard a guess at a few possible causes that *could* be affected by the government - insecurity and exploitation in employment and day-to-day life leading to anxiety and depression, feelings of being over-controlled and forced into doing things you hate. Will the government do anything about these factors? Yeah right. This is, after all, a state that deliberately goes out to scare us so that it can "save" us, that deliberately implements policies that make people insecure and subordinate to their employers. It's not in their interests to challenge these things at root.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
17:09 / 21.11.04
Well it's certainly the violence that's the problem, not the booze per se. Though it does seem ironic that Mr Tony's flagship bill for the next election is apparently going to all about Drugz, when supposedly Drugz-related crime ( gibbering, dirty junkies burglarising houses to nick the telly so they can pay for their next fix, etc, ) is by and large on the downturn, whereas the drinks-related variant appears to be heading for epidemic proportions.

Given that for whatever reason, a large section of the UK public is going to go out and have something or other at the end of the week, and the figures involved, it seems a bit counter-productive, to say the least, for the government to be effectively sponsoring one of the options, oddly enough the most socially harmful, according to it's own statistics, while even further demonising all of the rest.

Still 'Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,' and so on.

Not for the first time, I wonder if Mr Tony's really up to the job.
 
 
Loomis
17:22 / 21.11.04
It's one of those situations where one may seem to agree, but in fact your motivation and the government's motivation differ

Absolutely. I've got to the point where if Blair or Blunkett told me that the sun would rise tomorrow, I'd wonder what they were up to. This sort of classic scare-mongering is a mixture of the red-herring problems-at-home to keep our minds off the international situation, and the divisive tactics to keep rich and poor in fear of each other. This whole us and them thing is pissing me off (possibly partly to do with the amount of wine I've consumed tonight ... so I may be taking this personally).
 
 
Tryphena Absent
15:02 / 22.11.04
I don't understand *why* there is a problem here though. Why does Britain have this problem, whilst other countries don't have it to the same degree?

Because everyone drinks? Because we have a high alcohol content in our beer?

I think Britain has a drinking problem, almost everyone I know gets drunk once a week without even noticing that they are drunk. How can I tell? Well at this time of year my allergy kicks in super strength and I can have maybe one drink at a time without any ill effects, which gets frustrating and feels rather exclusionary. I think that's the real problem, people feel weird drinking soft drinks in pubs.

On top of that we have stupid licensing laws, we have buildings exclusively dedicated to serving alcohol and we have a shirt and shoes weekend club culture. How is that not disastrous?
 
 
sleazenation
15:30 / 22.11.04
Oh how I hate the shirt and shoes club cultre, which has bled into city centre pub culture outside of london.

I don't wear that shit for work and I'll be damned if certain establishments are going to get me to wear drag up in a suit and tie at the weekend.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
17:54 / 22.11.04
Well, I personally DO have a drinking problem, which I really wish I didn't and which is seriously fucking up my life. But I'm not gonna blame that on lax laws on alcohol (we have some of the harshest, afaik).

We do have a fairly endemic drinking culture- I'm not sure where this comes from.

We also have, to my mind, a fairly unpleasant national character- put the two together, and see what happens.

Personally, I think it's the latter that needs to be dealt with- it's kind of like that thing about violent crime involving mobile phone theft being treated more harshly than when a phone ISN'T involved- it seemed patently stupid, and the equivalent to putting a sticking plaster on a brain tumour.
 
 
solid~liquid onwards
18:01 / 22.11.04
As i see it, part of the root of the problem is young drinkers, you know the sort... bucky and MD 50/50 on the streets and when they hit legal drinking age they bring a bit of that culture into the pubs and clubs. Perhaps the sensible thing to do would be to allow parents to take their kids drinking and introduce them to the social drinking environment at a younger age. Lots of young people are going to drink anyway, so why not in a controlled environemt where they can learn the social aspect of drinking.

or we could legalise p0t and have smoking cafes for the social aspect. Most people i know much prefer some puff to drinking. A peson wasted on p0t is safer than a person wasted on alcohol
 
 
solid~liquid onwards
18:04 / 22.11.04
(parents bringing their kids drinking... limit on amount for the kids, like 2 pints or equivalent)
 
 
Tryphena Absent
18:51 / 22.11.04
Oh come on, cannabis is a hallucinogen, if you legalise it than you have to deregulate absinthe and all manner of other things. And don't make the mistake of blaming alcohol abuse on a load of teenagers, you only have as much trouble with them as you do with 26 year olds (and 50 year olds) with no tolerance for the particular type of drug they're taking. And they should know better, in fact those older people are worse because physically they're often more dangerous and they've got more to be aggressive about. Teenagers are more likely to get themselves run over.
 
 
unheimlich manoeuvre
20:28 / 22.11.04
i suspect that binge drinking and early pub closing times is a major factor in weekend socialising (read: violence). hopefully the relaxing of public house hours will reduce the drunken pack mentality in kebab shops, petrol stations etc.
the ban on smoking in public may lead to the decriminalisation of small quantities of marijuana in the home. i cannot imagine legal "coffee" shops in Britain in the near future.
 
 
illmatic
08:34 / 23.11.04
There was a huge article in The Guardian magazine this weekend about booze culture (can't find link). It's pitch was that all the stories about binge drinking and so on are actually an attempt to shift the focus back on the individual because the Government are basically in bed with the drinks industry, and too chickenshit to face up to the difficult taks of reducing overall consumption - this being the only thing that will really benefit public health. (New Labour in bed with industry regardless of the costs of the public - never!). Thus all the stories about "yob culture" and so on. It revealed a number of surprising statistics, that indicate we do have a huge problem with boozing in this country, that the number of bars/off licenses and so on has grown expoentially in recent years etc with the transformation of lots of town centres and so on. The most powerful stat was that cirrhosis of the liver has gone up by 900% in the last 30 years - this statistic (and any others that indicate we should collectively, cut the fuck down, have been dropped from Government documents and proposals.
 
 
Lurid Archive
08:45 / 23.11.04
How much of this is the product of climate? I mean, my experience of Ireland is that the drinking problem is a little worse there, as is the weather. If you go to a warm country, however (I'm thinking France, Spain or Italy) then the same drinking culture doesn't exist partly because of different attitudes to drinking, but possibly also because rain and cold rarely force one to stay inside. I'm sure studies have been done on this, and it is only one factor, but worth thinking about nonetheless.
 
 
Sax
09:07 / 23.11.04
The distressing thing about that Guardian article, Illmatic, was the Government's definition of a binge drinker: three pints of lager or three glasses of wine a day. I always thought binge drinking was going out on Friday night and having 17 pints. In other words, bingeing. Not steadily having a couple of scoops throughout the week.
 
 
illmatic
09:31 / 23.11.04
And part of that is that the booze is stronger now, and the measures are bigger....( we're commonly drinking stonger beers, wine glass measures have gone up)

I think it's part of the relentless marketing culture of the UK, if there's a gap in a market, plug it, plug it to excess, as long as you can turn a buck, regardless of the social cost.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
11:09 / 23.11.04
But would anyone really want to go back to drinking Carling all the time?
 
 
Alex's Grandma
11:47 / 23.11.04
Yeah, I was thinking about the Guardian article when I originally posted. I can't say I was all that surpised by the breweries' attitude, and from the circumspect way they answered most of the questions, it seems they're fully aware of the scale of the problem, having been schooled in how to dodge it in interviews. So I hate to try and argue for government intervention here, but if the breweries won't, for example, do something as simple as displaying the number of units in a pint of Stella ( growing up in the country, I did think for years I could have a couple of those and then drive home safely, ) then sooner or later it's going to all end in tears, as is currently happening with the tobacco industry.
 
 
illmatic
12:03 / 23.11.04
But would anyone really want to go back to drinking Carling all the time?

Maybe not, but personally I'm going off drinking high strength booze all the time. I drank strong lager on Friday night for the first time in a while, and being unable to pace myself, by the end of the night had lost control of what I was saying, fell asleep on the bus and felt like shit all the next day. Doesn't seem as attractive as it used to.
 
 
sleazenation
12:27 / 23.11.04
Y'see high strength lager doesn't really appeal to me - thus i find it relatively easy to rail against its ubiquity, while relatively lower strength beers, ales and porter and stouts are less widespread... If fresh fruit smoothies became a widespread fixture in pubs i might never go home...
 
 
unheimlich manoeuvre
17:53 / 23.11.04
the state of British drug culture, both legal (caffeine, nicotine & alcohol) and not (cannabis, cocaine, heroin & ecstasy) may be viewed as symptom of the general malaise.
 
 
madhatter
18:20 / 23.11.04
maybe i'm naive, but:

i was travelling around in britain and ireland for a month this summer. what i percieved was the following:

that you do not have any more drinking problem than we do in austria, but that you seem to have a problem with the handeling of agression when drunk.

it seemed to me that there is a kind of culture of violence-when-pissed, with (to me) strange behavioral codes: there were situations that would have turned into a ritual of (a) witty remarks, (b) reconciliation-by-saying-"cheers!" and then (c) another round of the good strong stuff, this time together, if encountered in austria.
the same situations in english and welsh pubs had one more step: the initial exchange of more-or-less serious violence. it was kind of "you hit me, i hit you, fine, so now we know we're both earthlings (or whatever) and can drink together."

an english friend tried to explain said phenomenon with the fact that, durig the day, politeness and the famous stiff upper lip were so unescapeable for most people, that in the evening they had more agression to get rid of then the average austrian drinkingmate.

maybe that's too cheap a psychology, but it's what i got as the first contact.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
18:53 / 23.11.04
Well I think you're right to an extent madhatter, but the stiff upper lip thing seems very much absent from UK culture at the best of times these days, everyone seems a lot happier to express their emotions whether drunk or not, it's just that with the exception of something like Princess Di's funeral, we seem to be a lot more touchy than we are touchy-feely, and a lot of the time just plain touchy-hitty.
 
 
Tom Morris
19:21 / 23.11.04
Alex writes:
So is Britain's drinking out of control ?
No. Britain is a landmass. It cannot drink, therefore it's drinking cannot be out of control. Britain's population may find their drinking out of control, in which case, they need to sort themselves out. But that's the individuals problems not the islands. And not the fricking state's either.

And if not, what's the problem ( Something endemic in British culture ? Something new, to do with Oasis, football and Zoo magazine ? The fault of the breweries, alcopops, happy hours, superpubs and so on ? ) and whatever it is how can it be dealt with, if that's even possible ? And are the proposed measures to relax the licensing laws going to alleviate the situation, or make it worse ? I mean I like the idea of being able to go to the pub at half One in the morning every now and again, but not if that means even longer lines at Casualty on a Saturday night.
Let's unpick this. The problem is people drinking too much. Oasis is a rock band. Football is a sport. Zoo Magazine is a magazine. I enjoy only one of those three, but I'm semi-teetotal (in the same sense as people say they are semi-vegetarian). How can it be dealt with? Simple. Personal responsibility. As for the licencing laws, it doesn't matter what the result is with this thing. The purpose of the law is to allow responsible drinkers to purchase alcohol at whenever it is commercially viable to do so. Violence is a side-effect, albeit a nasty one.

If you try to use legislation to solve the violent nasty people's problem through alcohol licensing, you are inevitably going to affect the honest drinker who isn't antisocial or violent or who get's really shitfaced. Instead, if you strengthen the criminal law for those who are antisocial and violent, you deal with those who are antisocial and violent, and allow the person who wants to go to a pub at 2am and have a drink the ability to do so without the tentacles of the state interuppting the business that goes on between them and the licensee.

Anna de Logardiere writes:
Oh come on, cannabis is a hallucinogen, if you legalise it than you have to deregulate absinthe and all manner of other things.
Good. Shoot for it. Legalise all that stuff. Personally, I wouldn't touch absinthe, and am not wild about smoking pot. But it's not the states business to tell me that I can't. It's a private transaction between me and the landlord/landlady/shopowner.

With regard to off-licences, I feel this bizarre conversation going on in my mind...
"We have to shut the off-licence at 10pm rather than midnight, since people might buy drinks after 10pm and be violent."
"Or they might not."
"Yeah, but they might. We can't take the risk."
"Yes, but what about the guy who comes home late and wants to buy a bottle of wine for a dinner party the next day."
"HE'S A CRIMINAL!!!!"

Ludicrous.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
20:00 / 23.11.04
Y'see high strength lager doesn't really appeal to me - thus i find it relatively easy to rail against its ubiquity,

Funny that - I too always find that the things that are not personally to my taste are much easier to present as part of a wider social PROBLEM than the things I love and think are fun...

In other words, I think Tom Morris is very, very wise to point out that Zoo is a magazine and Oasis is a band. Similarly, shirts and shoes are a form of clothing. I am disturbed by this idea that there is a category of people who cannot handle their drink who share attributes aside from 'people who cannot handle their drink' - I would caution against making such generalised assumptions...
 
 
Pepsi Max
04:50 / 24.11.04
I am a Brit living in Australia. Aussies are supposed to be notorious for their drinking but it ain't so. And a big part of it is climate. When they finish working, people do not automatically go down the boozer. And they tend to go out later. And pubs don't shut at 11pm.

And in terms of Brit character - yes, the UK is staggeringly uptight.
 
 
sleazenation
09:04 / 24.11.04
Who was making generalized assumptions? In the two posts i've made to this topic I have railed against establishments that require shirt and shoes as a term of entry on the grounds I don't drag up in such clothing at work and do not wish to do so during my leisure time.

I also stated that as someone who doesn't like high strength lager, I find it easy to rail against its dominant presence in drinking establishments where I would prefer to see a wider range of beverages that are more to my liking. This may be a flippant point, you might think it off-topic, but it is pretty far from portraying things I don't like as part of a social problem.
 
 
coweatman
14:49 / 24.11.04
i'm posting from boston, ma, in the us. the red sox haven't won the world series in something like 80+ years, and when they finally did, people flipped their shit and the riot cops shot an innocent bystander with a "less lethal" weapon, and a plastic ball full of pepper spray exploded inside her head and killed her. the mayor, of course, blamed alcohol, and not the cops using a weapon against the manufacturer's instructions. i was sure it was going to be a protester who got killed first by one of those, but i was proven wrong.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:46 / 24.11.04
Er, thanks for that.

Regarding sleaze's shirt and shoes comment, it makes a lot of sense if you consider that, as he says, the dress codes demanded by a huge number of pubs and clubs (especially in small towns like this one, where it's virtually impossible to get through the door if you're not uniformed up) is the complete opposite of what most people wear for the rest of their leisure time. It's clothing better suited to work, and is designed for that - collar shirts, stiff shoes, things that are purposefully formal and rigid to instill a sense of order and discipline.

In the workplace, that's fine, but force people into those same clothes when they're in a completely informal situation, where they're not just allowed to do what they're prevented from doing at work, but actively encouraged to do it, and you're asking for trouble.
 
 
w1rebaby
23:07 / 24.11.04
Yes, but come on, dress codes are not responsible for people attacking each other. Possibly they're part of a controlling social attitude that makes people rebel against it and engage in random chaos, but I really cannot see that factor as at all important, given also that it's not exactly a new thing. (Neither, of course, is alcohol-abetted violence.)

I'm moving more to the position that it's something about Britain that's always been the case and has always needed something done about it - it's just that now, it's being highlighted and blamed on a few convenient factors (mostly a vague "things are worse these days" idea of society and social influence, which is balls - is Nuts magazine worse than the pervasive sexist attitude that existed previously? etc) for political benefit. Doesn't mean we need to ignore it. Doesn't mean we need fascists to deal with it either.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
23:25 / 24.11.04
No, dress codes aren't responsible for anything in themselves. That they're a factor in a specific type of 'drinking culture' is inarguable, though. I wasn't attempting to make it out to be anything more than that, just offering up a supporting argument for an earlier comment.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
11:35 / 25.11.04
Then you've got other factors - density of population in the towns and cities, density of pubs within said area, unwillingness of licence-holders to make an educated guess as to whether a potential customer may have had enough to drink. My local has a happy hour that lasts six hours, every day, and high street bars and plastic pubs have frankly ridiculously affordable drinks prices.

And we have a pub culture whereby the result of almost any social occasion/event/malaise/issue is to drink. It's your birthday? Get slaughtered. Lost your job? Let's get the beer in. Christmas time? Red wine, port, brandy - kills the Christmas Eve hangover and goes well with the turkey, too. Drink after work. Drink at lunchtime. Take a break from shopping on Saturday, have a pint or two. Let's do shots! Shall we make this coffee a little Irish? You can't have New Year's Eve without champagne! You can't have Christmas Eve brekkie without Buck's Fizz! You can't get up in the morning without a brisk smack in the face with a large whiskey!
 
  

Page: (1)2

 
  
Add Your Reply