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The [State] is quite drunken enough
By Theodore Dalrymple
(Filed: January 1 2005

That the British are now a nation of drunken brutes, justly despised throughout the world wherever they congregate in any numbers, is so obvious a fact that it should require no repetition. A brief visit to the centre of any British town or city on a Saturday night - or indeed, almost any night - will confirm it for those who are still in doubt. There they will see scenes of charmless vulgarity, in which thousands of scantily clad, lumpen sluts scream drunkenly, and men vomit proudly in the gutters.

The Government, whose solution to any social problem is to make it worse, now proposes that the British, having conclusively proved that they cannot (or rather, will not) control themselves, should be granted even more licence to make a public nuisance of themselves whenever they feel like it, which is often. They will henceforth be able to drink in pubs and bars at all times of the day and night, 24 hours a day, instead of just most of the day and night. If there were shares in debauchery, I'd buy them now.

Of course, the Government claims to believe that, by allowing drinking establishments to open 24 hours a day, it will reduce public drunkenness. If it really believes this, it is a terrible indictment of the British nation: that it can allow itself to be led by such a collection of hopeless fools. As to the suggestion that we might develop here the kind of civilised Mediterranean café culture if only drinking outlets were open long enough, you might as well preach the comforts of the igloo and the tastiness of whale blubber to the Masai of Kenya.

More likely, of course, the Government is hoping to raise revenue, which it will spend, at least partly, on the vast apparatus of ''social care'' that the mass misbehaviour of the British population makes necessary. This is the politics of clientelism: those who misbehave will vote for you because they have grown fond of the licentiousness that you have allowed them, as will those whose livelihood depends on the mass misbehaviour whose effects they are supposed to ameliorate.

The Government says that it is ''working very closely with the [licensed] trade to make sure employees do not sell to drunken people''. This would be a deeply evil and infantilising transfer of moral responsibility from the consumer to the provider, if it were possible to enforce it, which almost certainly it is not. At any rate, it has not yet even been tried: and so here is yet another stable door waiting to be closed after the horse has bolted, a process typical of British social reform.

In any case, we already have enough regulations against public drunkenness. Our problem is that we have no will to enforce them. It is, of course, impractical to arrest two or three million people every night, as theoretically should happen if our laws were to be obeyed; but it is not necessary. There are municipalities that do enforce by-laws against drinking in the streets and public drunkenness, and they are free of debauchery and violence. The problem is that short-sighted councils have allowed the economies of their town and city centres to become economically dependent on the re-enacting of scenes from Gin Lane.

The deeper problem lies in the fact that much of our population believes not only that it has no duty to control itself, but also that it is actually harmful to try to do so. It believes that ``letting its hair down'' - that is to say screaming, smashing bottles, vomiting, urinating against walls in full view of others, swaying drunkenly in the gutter, hailing complete strangers to give them lifts, and so forth - is essential to its health and emotional well-being: that drinking in this fashion is a kind of Aristotelian catharsis, formerly achieved by watching the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

There is a sadness in all of this. Listening to young people talk about the wonderful night they have just had, I have been struck by how the proof of a good time seems almost always to be a complete amnesia for it. There can be no higher accolade for a night than that no trace of it remains in the brain of the person who lived through it. ''Getting wasted'', and then behaving antisocially before passing out altogether, is the pinnacle of their social life.

Like the patients who often ask me for drugs to prevent them from thinking, or Zen Buddhists who want to achieve a state of no mind, young Britons find the world so horrible that blotting it out altogether is their only happiness. It does not seem ever to occur to them that they are helping by their drunkenness to make the world around them just a little bit more horrible.

In France, there are notices in many places specifying the provisions of the Law for the Repression of Public Drunkenness. What is reassuring about this is not that the repression is heavy-handed - the problem is far less serious in France than in Britain - but that there is an awareness that repression is necessary, desirable and publicly acceptable.

This is no longer so in Britain: the young people I have described are no longer even aware that they are doing anything wrong. Just as the Government is so corrupt that it does not know that it is corrupt, so these young people are so lacking in self-respect that they do not know that self-respect is desirable.

When drunkenness declined in Britain during the second half of the 19th century, it did so not because the government legislated it, but because the people realised that habitual drunkenness was morally harmful and incompatible with self-respect. There has been a Gestalt switch: now drunkenness, to the point of brutish amnesia, is regarded as admirable, a high achievement. The sober - by whom I mean the decently behaved - are made to feel that they are killjoys, puritans, even social inadequates.

By its changes to licensing laws, and the proposed further changes, successive governments have endorsed this psychological switch: for there is nothing bad and power-seeking governments fear more that a virtuous and self-controlled population. Therefore, let them drink alco-pops. Then they will be dependent upon us.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.

............ Lloyd George was ... a strong supporter of [Socialist] "land reform."

He was heavily influenced by [Socialist] pamphlets written by [The Socialists] George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb of the [Socialist] Fabian Society on "the need" "to tackle" the "issue of land ownership." [Private property Rights!]

[Lloyd George was] .... in the Asquith government (1908-15) he was chancellor of the Exchequer and the man behind the infamous [Socialist!] "people's budget" of 1909. The [Socialist] budget that promoted higher land taxes and a supertax on incomes over £3000 to pay for social reform programs ....

[He was] "a reformer," an early architect of [Socialist!] "social welfare" programs .....

Lloyd George .... was determined to take [Socialist] action that in his words would "lift the shadow of the workhouse from the homes of the poor."

He believed the best way of doing this was to "guarantee an income to people" who were "too old to work." Based on the [Socialist] ideas of Tom Paine that first appeared in his book Rights of Man in 1791, Lloyd George's [Socialist] Old Age Pensions Act, "provided" [Socialist] pensions to people over seventy.

To "pay for" these [Socialist] pensions Lloyd George had to raise government taxes by an additional £16 million a year. In 1909 Lloyd George announced what became known as the [Socialist] "People's Budget." [Which] included [Socialist] graduated increases in taxation. Whereas people on lower incomes were to pay little tax while those on higher incomes were taxed at a much higher percentage.

Lloyd George also exploited "class" envy and introduced a new [Socialist] "supertax" for those earning a paltry [$8,000.00] a year. Other measures included a [Socialist] increase in death taxes on the estates of "the rich" and heavy and punitive [Socialist] taxes on profits gained from the ownership and sale of property.

Other [Socialist] "innovations" in [The socialist] Lloyd George's [Socialist] budget included [Socialist] labour exchanges and a [Socialist] "children's allowance" on income tax.

Lloyd George also destroyed the checks and balances historically provided by the House of Lords and thus altered once-great britain's form of government from a Constitutional Monarchy to the effective [Authoritative totalitarian-socialist] elected dictatorship under which it now suffers -- and to which Lloyd-George-initiated process the post-Lloyd-George twentieth century has seen the rapidly-escalating stripping away of ever more of every once great briton's once treasured, albiet limited, rights -- and of his his every individual liberty!

Until, today, when even the most casual of objective observations discovers there are no private property rights whatever -- and it can only be said that an Englishman's house is his burgler's castle.

Great thread, T B -- certainly got the serpents heads sticking out of their hesperophobically-fevered swamps!

BUMPping