My name
is Britain, and I have a drink problem
The mixed-up licensing bill won't help this
country kick its alcohol habit
Martin Kettle
Saturday May 31, 2003
The Guardian
As most of the football pundits foresaw, not a lot happened on the field in
this week's European Cup final. AC Milan and Juventus played out a dull
goalless draw over two hours in Manchester on Wednesday evening, before Milan
won the penalty shootout. So far, so predictable.
But the interesting thing
is that not a lot happened off the field either. Fully 50,000 Italian football
supporters made the journey to Manchester this week. They came from two proud
rival cities, with honour, glory and passion at stake. It was an explosive mix.
Yet when it was all over and the Italians had gone home, Greater Manchester
police had recorded not a single incident (and, no, before you say it, they
weren't talking about the game) and had made a total of zero arrests. The visitors
were a credit to their country, a police spokesman purred.
Imagine if the roles had
been reversed. Suppose Manchester United had been playing Leeds United in a
final held in Milan (go on, let me dream). Can anyone imagine the Milan police
keeping a clean sheet with 50,000 English fans on foreign soil, the way the
Manchester police did with the Italians? A credit to their country? No, I don't
think so either. So what's the difference? How is it that Italians know how to
behave properly in public and we don't? The difference is simple. They don't
have an alcohol problem. We do.
If you look at the
figures, you will find that the average Italian and the average Briton drinks
more or less the same amount of alcohol per head each year - the equivalent of
about eight litres of pure alcohol. But that's where the cultures diverge.
Italians spread their drinking out. Notoriously, we concentrate ours. And
Italy's alcohol consumption is dropping, in line with the pattern in the
majority of countries in Europe. In Britain, we are in the minority of
countries where alcohol consumption is rising.
Only the most sozzled end
of the drinks trade now denies that Britain has a drink problem. Or that the
heart of our problem is binge drinking by young people, including by under-age
drinkers, in the centre of towns. If you are in any doubt about this, and since
it seems set to be a nice warm summer weekend, then take a stroll into the
middle of your local town this evening at around 11pm. I'm afraid you won't
want to repeat the experience any time soon.
The government recognises
that we have a problem. That is why a wide-ranging licensing bill has been
working its way through parliament since late last year. With the exception of
the communications bill - that's the one that will let Rupert Murdoch acquire
even more of the British media than he has got already - it is the most
important and detailed piece of law-making that faces MPs when they return to
Westminster next week after their spring break.
Interestingly, the two bills
have things in common. For one, they both come under the Department for
Culture, Media and Sport. More significantly, they both show that New Labour is
much more at ease promoting deregulation than promoting regulation. Or, to put
it another way, that they are happier doing the bidding of the richest players
in the relevant industry than they are defying them.
The two bills have this
difference, though. For months before it was put before parliament, the
communications bill was subjected to a detailed process of pre-legislative
scrutiny. That process - part of the reform legacy of Robin Cook - has at least
meant that the key issues have been clearly identified and have been reflected
in good drafting. You may disagree with the communications bill, but at least
it is technically a professional piece of work.
The reverse is true of the
licensing bill. It is hard to think of a more muddle-headed and confused piece
of legislation than this bill was when it was first debated in the House of
Lords before Christmas. Part of the muddle was caught in the spotlight earlier
this year when everyone from pub landlords to the Bishop of London complained
that, as drafted, the bill would have been the most effective suppression of
live music since the days of Oliver Cromwell. If ever a bill would have
benefited from Cook's pre-legislative scrutiny process, it was the licensing
bill.
The minister in charge,
Kim Howells, has tried hard to disentangle those provisions over the past few
months. His pragmatic approach means that the bill today is undoubtedly
animprovement on the bill that was launched last year. But even after 17
substantial sessions in standing committee, the fundamental muddle-headedness
remains, even if the drafting muddles have been reduced.
At the heart of the bill
remains a dangerous delusion. That delusion is the belief that by liberalising
our licensing laws we will reduce heavy public drinking and all the attendant
problems of public drunkenness in our city centres. Put another way, it is the
delusion that an act of parliament can make us behave like Italians.
Ours is not the only
country that has tried this route. Ireland too has tried to change from a pub
culture to a cafe culture by allowing bars to stay open much later, just as the
licensing bill will allow here. The result has not been tapered and regulated
drinking, but an explosion in alcohol consumption, nearly 50% up over the past
decade. It is a mark of our insularity - our reluctance to draw on any
country's experience other than that of the United States - that the spiralling
catastrophe of Ireland's licensing liberalisation has had almost no impact on
the British government's blinkered belief in deregulation as the answer to
everything.
This week, though, the
Irish government did something that Britain can no longer afford to ignore. It
set itself a six-week target to enact sweeping new measures to reverse the
liberalisation of the 1990s. Closing times are to be brought forward. Under-21s
are to be required to carry ID. No one under 18 will be allowed in any bar
after 8pm. And it will become an offence to serve a drink to anyone who is
already drunk.
Ireland's politicians have
been forced to act in this way because liberalisation created not cafe culture
but a late-night battlefield of drunkenness and its attendant dangers. In
particular, it fuelled binge drinking among young people, including under-age
drinkers. In Ireland, one in five 12- to 14-year-olds is now a regular drinker.
So are two in three 15- to 16-year-old boys and half of girls of the same age.
Nearly half of Ireland's 18- to 24-year-old men now engage in "high-risk
drinking", as do an amazing two-thirds of Irish women in the same age
group.
Yet this is the kind of
society which the British government is set upon creating here. It is the kind
of Britain that is still implicit in the licensing bill. Like Ireland until
recently, Britain is a society in denial about its drinking. When the bill
comes back to the Commons for its third reading, MPs have an obligation to
learn from what has happened in Dublin this week. We dream of a drinking
culture like that of Italy, but the nightmare is that unless we think again we
will become a drinking culture like the one Ireland is now struggling to
curtail.