Civitas Blog

They make interesting but depressing reading. It found, according to the Times’ summary, that ‘excessive drinking is killing people in Britain faster than anywhere else in Europe as the country’s consumption of alcohol continues to soar’.

Deaths from drink-related cirrhosis of the liver have in recent years undergone a steep rise in Britain while they have fallen elsewhere in Europe. Apparently, in the 1950’s, ‘England and Wales had the lowest rates of liver cirrhosis death in Western Europe.’ Excessive drinking now, apparently, kills more than 22, 000 people annually in the UK.

These findings call into question and corroborate the suspicions many of us have long harboured as to the un-wisdom of the present government’s relaxation of laws governing the licensing of hours during which alcohol may lawfully be purchased or consumed in public.

On this score, Professor Room is quoted as having said:

‘The UK Government has turned a blind eye to the problem and has failed to make the reduction of the population’s alcohol intake a policy goal.… Through new alcohol licensing law and the official guidance on it, the national government has also done its best to tie the hands of local government on this issue.’

It was not necessary to have a degree in rocket-science, let alone medicine, to be able to see the folly of the present government’s policy in having relaxed the licensing laws and in its continued refusal to discourage excessive drinking by restoring the relative price of alcohol in comparison with other good to the very much higher level it had in the 1950's when alcohol consumption here was low. Twice before on this web-site in recent months, I have drawn attention to this same issue, each time saying exactly what Professor Room has about the government's policy on alcohol, but adding in each case a little more by addressing other public policy issues which I claim to be connected.

The two relevant postings are those for 25 August 2005 and for 18 November. The first was entitled 'Why it is in the Wrong Spirit that the Government is Encouraging the Nation to Drown Its Sorrows. The second was entitled, 'Time Gentlemen Please for Some Joined-Up Government'. The entries are reproduced below:

(August 25, 2005)

Why it is in the Wrong Spirit that the Government is Encouraging the Nation to Drown Its Sorrows

Last month, according to a report in today’s Times, saw a massive increase in muggings on the streets of London and of such suburbs as have loaned it their uniformed police officers to help patrol the capital's public transportation system in wake of the heightened security concerns triggered by the terror bombings at the start of that month there.

The threat of further terror strikes in the capital has not abated. Indeed, if anything it has intensified and shows no signs of going away for the foreseeable future.

It can then hardly be the right moment for the government to be embarking on a social experiment likely to stretch police resources still further away from what should be their normal task of protecting the law-abiding against criminal predators.

However, it is on such a foolhardy course that the present government seems intent by pressing on with its plan to relax current licensing laws to allow very much longer opening times for pubs and off-licenses.

It seems intent on continuing with this course, despite severe criticism by police and judges who have said that extending hours will merely add further alcoholic fuel to the already raging fires of drunken violence that nightly turn our city centres into no-go areas, save for all intent on taking part in what seems to have become the new national past-time for Britain’s young of binge drinking.

In a piece of insane reasoning worthy of a character from Lewis Caroll’s 'Through the Looking Glass', the government justifies its policy by claiming that, by keeping pubs open for longer, urgency will be removed from drinkers to get down a few bevvies before closing time. It claims the current fast-track to drunken disorderliness will make way for a gracious meandering lane to quiet inebriation, apparently what the government considers(wrongly as it now turns out) the fashion on the continent, where extended open hours are said to encourage less frantic alcohol consumption.

It would be interesting to know upon exactly what evidence, if any, the government bases its surmise that, by extending British opening hours, it will reduce drunkenness.

The notion that it is likely to do any such thing seemingly flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary provided by the annual spectacle of young British holiday makers in Europe displaying their legendary propensity for getting drunk. They seem unmoved by Europe’s longer opening hours to moderate their native approach towards drinking which may best be described as drink-as-much-as-you-can-as-fast-as-you-can-and–then-knock-over-everything- in-sight-that-moves-until-you-pass-out-in-a-drunken-stupor.

The general short-sightedness and complete lack of intelligence displayed by the present government’s approach towards dealing with social problems, or at least those that it considers such, and of which its approach towards the problem of binge-drinking is but an instance, is never better illustrated than by the findings released this week by the Office of National Statistics on social inequality. These reveal how little progress the government has made since 1997 in its multifarious efforts to close the gap between rich and poor. Despite all its initiatives and special measures since gaining office to reduce inequality, it turns out it has had next to no effect in achieving that goal.

The principal reason it has failed to do so is something on which the present government chooses not to dwell. Setting aside the special problem posed by endogenously generated radical Islamism among Britain’s disaffected young Muslims, which has an entirely different and peculiar cause, what primarily lies behind practically all of Britain’s present current social problems, from binge-drinking, through anti-social behaviour to relative deprivation, is the collapse of the two-parent family. For this collapse has left large numbers of young males, especially those from the lowest social classes where single parent families are most frequently found, inadequately socialised and unmoored by claims of familial responsibilities.

The government refuses to address this problem – or even to acknowledge that it really is one, let alone how much of a principal cause it is of all those that it does identify as such.

If we stand back and ask what must be done to put the genie of deracinated, demoralised, out-of-control, drunken, violent, and disorderly British young males back in the bottle of tranquil domestic responsibility, the search for an answer must surely take us back in time, before the 1960’s radical feminism that did so much to undermine the family and to inform present social policy of new-Labour, to a much deeper earlier cause.

This cause of the nations's woes is the current virtual absence among all classes, but especially so among elites, of any believed purpose in life of the sort formerly provided by and through participation within some organised religion, principally here, Christianity.

A restoration of regular national church attendance and its associated way of life, of which belief in the sanctity of (heterosexual) marriage formed an integral part, would certainly do much to quell practically all of today’s acute social problems. This is especially so, if such a life-style were to be sincerely adopted by teachers and others who like teachers set an example and exert a profound moral influence upon young people.

But is such a sea-change in British public and private life really the only way in which to achieve this desired result? And, if it isn’t strictly necessary, is a mass public return to some form of organised religion preferable to any equally as effective secular alternative way in which to provide the British people, especially the young, with a personally and socially benign sense of purpose in life?

The present government is seemingly intent on restoring such a sense of purpose, especially in the young, by encouraging people, and especially the young, to engage socially beneficial forms of voluntary activity. Whilst no doubt vastly preferable to anti-social behaviour, all such activity can in itself do for those who engage in it is occupy their time constructively. It would leave them bereft of any purpose were, admittedly per impossible, they successful in fixing all social problems. Fixing what is wrong in life can hardly be an adequate purpose for it!

In the absence of any promising secular alternative, short of once again being plunged into total war against a totalitarian enemy bent on the nation’s destruction -- a prospect not to be ruled out presently, but neither one to be devoutly wished for, it would seem that organised religion alone holds the field as able to provide such a benign sense of purpose.

Despite whatever reservations anyone might rightly have about the left-leaning former prelate’s grasp of micro-economics, William Temple seemed to have been spot on when, in his Presidential Address to the York Diocesan Conference in June 1929, he remarked that ‘the need of the world now is not more liberty for the exercise of men’s various faculties, but some purpose in life which may give significance and harmony to the enjoyment of that liberty’.

He seems no less correct in having supposed, at least for those Englishmen and women who do not belong to some other faith, that such a purpose could only be supplied by the Christian religion.

We tend today to think the current problems of crime, drunkenness and disorderliness among young people, that I have claimed indirectly but inextricably connected with the collapse of the two-parent family, are of only fairly recent provenance. But there is evidence that all of them began to appear simultaneously well before the 1960’s, and then, as now, arose from people's lack of any benign sense of purpose in their lives, such as attachment to some genuine historic world-religion provided their fore-bears and would have provided them.

Consider the results of a survey of the ethical views and leisure-habits of 1,000 randomly sampled York residents carried out by Seebom Rowntree towards the end of Labour’s first period of office, published in 1951 in a book entitled 'English Life and Leisure'. Rowntree’s findings were summarised by the American conservative writer, Russell Kirk, in an article he wrote at the time when in England on a Guggenheim scholarship to study British society.

Kirk summarises Rowntree’s 1951 findings so:

‘Physical poverty is virtually extinguished in York; but the moral condition of the new welfare-society that has replaced poverty is a dreadful thing… The conduct confessed and the convictions expressed … are … of a population among whom thirty per cent of the babies are conceived out of wedlock, of whom only ten per cent go to church, who spend twice as much on drink and tobacco as upon rents and property-taxes, whose acquisitive habits make it impractical to put towels in public lavatories, whose Sunday reading is the rape and seduction items in the 'News of the World'.… These case histories are the record of people cut off from tradition, social sympathy, and the hope of posterity, wretched social insects caught in the trap of self, men and women bored with pleasure, bored with people, bored with life, trying to forget through a few pints or a ticket in a football poll the drab futility of existence.’

Does that sound familiar?

Kirk rightly traces the descent of so many post-war residents of York into ennui, and beyond that into the false and short-lived comforts of the bottle, to the decline of religion in English national life, of which decline he claims the causes to be multifarious. One prime cause Kirk identifies is the deterioration in the calibre of those entering the church brought on by inadequate stipends caused by the cost of funding the levelling policies championed by the likes of Seebohm Rowntree and other supporters of the Atlee government.

Be that as it may, Kirk contrasted, with the bored anomic residents of post-war York, the medieval craftsman and guildsmen who helped to construct and decorate its cathedral. His words have profound contemporary relevance in connection with what lies at the root of so many of the country’s current social problems.

Kirk wrote:

‘The guildsmen were not bored, because they had hope and consolation bound up with their ordinary endeavours. But the modern workmen are bored, because their work itself, for the most part, is mere routine, and because that work is only part of the production-consumption equation…. Life with principle, work with purpose: political liberality is no substitute for these… [M]ere additional doses of “social planning” …can[not] preserve or restore man’s higher nature….

‘We must … look beyond humanitarian sociology, if this society of ours is to endure: looking toward a mundane future nobler in aspiration, yes, but also towards the towers of York Minster.’

In our present pluralistic, largely secular society, it might seem beyond the remit of legitimate governmental concern for it to have any regard to what possible social benefit might accrue from a restoration in popularity of organised religion in English national life.

I, for one, do not see how that can possibly be so. Increasingly, it seems to me it is on matters to do with culture, and not with gross national product or its equitable distribution, that the fate and future happiness of the nation turns. In connection with such matters, the potential role religion might be able to play in national renewal seems to me absolutely pivotal.

Spirit might well then be the answer to the country’s present ills, but not of that sort which the government currently seems hell-bent on forcing down the nation’s throat.

One feels like calling out to it: 'Time gentlemen, and ladies, please -- to come round to your collective senses and to reconsider what still further furies you are, albeit unintentionally, about to unleash upon the hapless and long-suffering British public! Time, ladies and gentleman, please!'

(November 18, 2005)

Time Gentlemen Please for Some Joined-Up Government

The Government wants and will soon announce new ways to force low-income workers to save more for their retirement. It has already announced it intends to extend by 2 years until 67 the age before which the full state pension can be drawn.

Given the relative inelasticity in demand for alcohol, plus the demonstrable highly damaging effect on health of more than moderate levels of consumption, would not the best way to induce such saving be for the government to impose a steep increase on the duty levied on alcohol, ear-marking that revenue for pensions?

At a stroke, the government would achieve the increased ‘savings’, improve the heath of the nation, and, as an added bonus, reduce the social disorder associated with binge-drinking and the costs of policing it.

The price of alcohol has fallen in real terms very severely over the last couple of decades, thereby stoking demand and its associated costs.

The alternative is to raise taxes or find some other way in which to force people to save more. In the end, whatever it decides will amount to the same thing, as they will have less disposable income and therefore have to reduce their consumption of non-necessities such as alcohol.

Of course, it would have been much better had the country never had to start from such a situation as it finds itself in, but that is besides the point. The country faces a real pension crisis and something has to give.

At least, on the suggestion mooted above, private sector workers, shortly to be made to slog on to age 67 before being able to draw their full state pension, will be able to take some comfort from the thought that their public-sector counterparts, who continue to remain able to retire on full occupational pension at 60, will no longer be able to down quite as many pints as before at the local, as their private-sector counterparts toil to pay for their public-sector pensions.