was strewn all over Fleet Street — broken marriages, stunted careers and inflamed livers. The British press were pioneers of 24-hour opening and regarded themselves as experts on its potential consequences years before the 2001 General Election, when Tony Blair wooed young voters with a promise on a beer mat: ‘cdnt give a XXXX 4 lst ordrs? Vote labour on thrsdy 4 xtra time.’
By that point, of course, the Fleet Street presses had been dismantled, staff had scattered across the capital and a sandwich in front of a computer terminal had replaced the once traditional liquid lunch. Small wonder, perhaps, that journalists were so sceptical about Labour’s idea to introduce a family-friendly cafe-style drinking culture to Britain.
The government’s argument was that our obvious problems with alcohol stemmed, in part, from outdated and austere licensing laws. Ministers pointed to southern Europe where a relaxed attitude resulted, it was said, in a more mature relationship with drink. Instead of booze being consumed between strict opening and closing times behind frosted glass, they proposed new light-touch legislation promoting freedom, choice and ‘the further development within communities of our rich culture of live music, dancing and theatre’.
Almost without exception, the press thought the idea was bonkers. Far from replacing drunkenness and social disorder with community dance and drama, they predicted 24-hour opening would mean 24-hour mayhem. Our towns and city centres, already resembling war zones on Friday and Saturday nights, would become permanent no-go areas.
Britain’s relationship with alcohol, critics argued, was built upon a northern European beer-drinking tradition entirely at odds with the habits of the wine-sipping south. Just look at what happens, it was pointed out, when UK tourists arrive in Spain, France and Italy to experience their foreign ways. Entire television series had been commissioned solely to document the shameful alcohol-soaked fallout from this culture clash. The conclusion was obvious: it might be fine for Rome but it could never work in Romford.
There is, though, a huge hole in this argument — the common but mistaken belief that alcohol
Early evidence that boozy Britain’s lager louts and bingeing yobs might not be the monstrous creations of the evil drink can be traced to flower-strewn California in 1969. Two social scientists at UCLA, Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton, were looking at how people from different cultures react when they drink. They argued that, if alcohol itself is responsible for drunken behaviour, there should be little variation between cultures. To their surprise, they discovered wide differences. In some societies drinking made people passive; in others they became aggressive. What was more, if the cultural belief was that alcohol made people less inhibited they did indeed become noisy and extrovert. If the cultural belief was that drinking made you quiet and depressed, drinkers reacted that way instead.
MacAndrew and Edgerton’s book,
The conclusion was that the way people behave when drunk is determined ‘not by alcohol’s toxic assault upon the seat of moral judgement’, but by how their society responds to drunkenness. The book closes with a homily: ‘Since societies, like individuals, get the sorts of drunken comportment that they allow, they deserve what they get.’ Britain’s drink problems, it was suggested, were not the fault of drink but of Britain.
Another intrepid team of academics headed for Cuba, where traditional standards of behaviour require drinkers to down large amounts of alcohol but hold their own in fast-flowing conversations. The researchers hung about in Cuban bars and recorded how customers rarely slurred their speech or fell off their chairs despite being very drunk.
Research demonstrated that it was a similar story at Danish dinner parties, Georgian ritual feasts, the drinking contests of Laos and (until the Europeans arrived) the cactus-wine ceremonies of the Papago of Mexico. In all these situations, people drank until they were completely plastered, but in none was there the kind of violence and antisocial behaviour familiar to the residents of a British market town on a Friday night.
The link between alcohol and aggression did not exist in the majority of societies investigated. Behaviour varied even within contemporary Western culture. One piece of research observed what happened when northern European tourists went drinking in a southern European setting. At one restaurant table, a Scandinavian would be drinking a bottle of wine; at the next, a Spaniard or an Italian would consume an identical bottle. In most cases, the experts noted a striking difference: the northern visitors showed classic signs of intoxication, while the locals seemed unaffected.
Scientists attempted to replicate these field observations in the laboratory. In the early 1970s, psychologists at Washington State University somehow managed to recruit young male undergraduates for a series of experiments involving free alcohol. On arrival in a simulated bar room in the basement of the department, half the eager guinea pigs were given what they thought was vodka and tonic while the rest were told they were drinking only tonic water. What they didn’t know was that the half of those who thought they were drinking vodka received only tonic, and the half of those who were told they had a glass of tonic were actually drinking alcohol. The concentrations and quantities of alcohol served were at the brink of what people may detect, so that even the most experienced drinker would be unlikely to spot any deception.
The students were then put through a series of tests to measure how drunk they felt and observe their behaviour. Subjects who drank tonic water but thought it was alcohol showed most of the ‘classic’ symptoms of intoxication, while those who drank alcohol but thought it was tonic water did not. Similar results were later recorded in tests for aggression and sexual arousal.
The evidence was compelling. The way people behave when they are drunk is largely determined by the way their society expects them to behave. It is less a chemical and more a cultural phenomenon.
The startling idea that there is nothing inevitable about the link between drink and disorder reached Britain in the mid-1990s and began to filter into Whitehall thinking. The Home Office Drugs Prevention Office advised ministers that, while most violent crime was committed by people who are drunk, ‘there is room to argue that this is a culturally mediated effect rather than a necessary effect of alcohol.’
This finding probably raised no more than an eyebrow among the few Members of Parliament who read the report, but it should have posed profound questions for policy. What was it about British culture that caused drunks to become aggressive and unpleasant while their counterparts in other countries just fell asleep?
Social scientists had been pondering the same question and came up with a theory. Alcohol, it was suggested, gives drinkers a time out from normal sober behaviour, permission to behave in ways that would otherwise be unacceptable. There are still social limits on how and how far a drunk may stray, but these limits vary between cultures. In some societies, notably in northern Europe and North America, alcohol is imbued with a malevolent power to lead people into sin. Its effects are often likened to possession by evil spirits, echoing the ‘demon drink’ warnings of the nineteenth-century temperance preachers.
Anthropologists draw a distinction between what they call temperance and non-temperance cultures, suggesting a link between people’s behaviour and their belief that alcohol contains some dark diabolical force. In 1889, the English journalist George Sims, an advocate of the temperance movement, wrote about the appalling living conditions that drove the poor to alcohol. ‘The drink dulls every sense of shame,’ he said, ‘and reduces them to the level of brutes.’ A century later, heavy metal rocker Ozzy Osbourne recorded these lyrics on his album
