Dealing with Drinking
Hackney Gazette
The English have had a hard drinking culture for centuries. The famous 18th Century artist Hogarth produced many a engraving of people dead drunk, like the famous “Gin Lane”. And I notice, living and going about my business in Hackney, how much public drinking and drunkenness have become part of daily life. Whether it’s clusters of alcoholics clutching cans and sitting on a wall, whether it’s young people with cans of extra-strength lager in broad daylight, or having to wade your way through vomit on a Saturday night in club and restaurant areas like Upper Street or Hoxton. When I was a child alcohol was something for special occasions, a bottle of sweet sherry or Advocaat at Christmas etc. But now drink is cheaper, heavily advertised and easily available in, not just pubs, but supermarkets and corner shops. The “Happy Hour” in bars and clubs encourages people to get paralytically drunk in the shortest possible time. This drink culture is bad for the people involved in it, and bad for the rest of us.
With this in mind, I am pleased that a debate has begun about the problem of underage drinking. This debate was triggered by the murder of …in Cheshire by a group of drunken young people. The local Chief Constable came out and said that: alcohol is now too readily available; it is too cheap and it is too strong. He argued that young people are more prone to violence when they have been drinking and that much more needs to be done to prevent the availability of alcohol to young people if street crime is ever to be stopped. The two main strategies that the Chief Constable gave for doing this were parents taking more responsibility for their children’s behaviour, and raising the age when young people can legally drink.
I agree that parents should take more responsibility for what their children are getting up to. I also think it is a good idea for parents to discourage their children from drinking alcohol when they are under the age limit. However, we must remember that many children are effectively out of control. Furthermore, if the age limit was raised to 21, I doubt if many young people who are currently 18 would stop drinking. What seems a more important issue to me is the lack of understanding we have in this country of why young people drink.
A lot of young people drink for exactly the same reasons that adults drink. They think it helps them relax, or gives them more confidence, or because they feel that certain social occasions call for drinking. And of course because all their friends are doing it. Many children drink alcohol with the express intention of getting blind drunk. And it can be assumed that much of the drinking behaviour of children is copied from their parents and the adults around them. This means that in order to tackle the underage drinking problem, it may well be necessary to tackle the general drinking problem in this country. The amount of alcohol drunk in France each year is considerably more than in the UK. The difference is that France, like many other European countries, has an entirely different attitude to drink. Alcohol is drunk with meals, and the taste of the drink is enjoyed in a similar way to food. Treating drink in this way reduces the need to get senselessly drunk every time alcohol is drunk.
We should always remember it is not only under-privileged young people in areas like Hackney who go in for binge drinking. Educated middle class young people in good schools and colleges do exactly the same. But, it is the link between binge drinking and violence which is so frightening. I believe the Chief Constable had some good ideas. It should be made easier to ban public drinking (except in restaurants and other licensed premises) in city centres. This will stop the gangs of young people gathering in parks or on street corners with their cans of cheap larger. And in the long term parents must take more responsibility for their children. But I suspect that simply putting up the price of drink or raising the legal age when you are allowed to drink alcohol will not work.
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