From Gin Lane to Faliraki

Ah, Sarah Lyall. Bless her. The New York Times' London correspondent has an entertainingly gruesome piece on the lagered-up misbehaviour of Brits on tour. No-one who has spent any time on Cyprus or the Costa del Sol will need reminding of the horrors that await the unwary or innocent traveller who stumbles upon the modern British tourist in his - and, indeed, her - natural element. It is, as you would expect from Ms Lyall, well done and, in places, appeallingly, well, dry:

But they [Brits in Greece] said that the lurid stories are media exaggerations.

“I’ve never seen anyone get stabbed the whole time I’ve been here,” said Chris Robinson, 21, speaking outside the Loft bar, which had a special deal: four drinks and two shots for $8.

Similarly, Eleanor Seaver, 20, said that she had been in Malia for two months, working in a club, and that she had never once been in a fight. On the contrary, she said, people are comradely and helpful. “If there’s a girl being sick in the streets, you see people helping her out,” she said. “We watch out for each other here.”

Paul Fisher, a 49-year-old Welshman who runs a bar and a motorbike-rental shop, said the stories both depressed the tourist trade and, perversely, drew the sort of visitors for whom drunken anarchy is an attractive prospect.

“We don’t like you lot coming in and ruining the place,” Mr. Fisher said, referring to reporters. He opened a drawer and produced a copy of the celebrity magazine Closer. An article inside featured a young female British tourist’s “booze-fueled orgy with four men” in Malia.

Things like that give Malia a bad name, Mr. Fisher said. “This is wrong and it’s overexaggerated,” he said.

On the other hand, he conceded, “for 10 weeks, this place is littered with kids being sick and unconscious in the streets.”

James Poulos suspects Britons behave like this because we inhabit "the most mirthless of all pink police states" while Rod Dreher wonders if a decline in religious observance could be connected to this destructive ghastliness. Well, up to a point my friends. 

It is true that other countries do not behave like this. Perhaps they have adapted to modernity better than Britons. But if one takes a longer or broader look at the matter then one realises that this sort of boorish drunkeness has been the norm, not the exception in British history. There were reasons beyond a desire for control and the pleasures of tut-tutting disapproval for the rise of the temperance movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Fun fact: Winston Churchill was kicked out of the House of Commons in 1922 when he lost his Dundee seat to Neddy Scrymgeour of the Scottish Prohibition Party. Second fun, or surprising fact: whole areas of Glasgow, such as Cathcart, remained dry until as recently as the 1970s).

One need only think of Hogarth's etchings warning of the pernicious social consequences of drink or, a century later, of Cruikshank's cartoons such as "The Bottle" or "The Worship of Bacchus" to remember that booze has been a, perhaps the, major social issue in Britain for at least the past quarter of a millenium. Of course, Hogarth championed Beer Street as a sweet and healthy alternative to the sozzled excess of Gin Lane but then again, beer was generally healthier than water in those days.

Still, concerns with the behaviour of working class Britons were reflected by Lloyd George's complaint during the First World War that "we are fighting Germany, Austria, and drink; and, as far as I can see, the greatest of these three deadly foes is drink." Drunkeness amongst munitions workers even led the government to nationalise some pubs close to factories. Fresh restrictions on opening hours were passed during the war and these endured until the 1990s. It's fair to say that licensing liberalisation, while a good thing in itself, has not also had unfortunate consequences in other areas.

In other words, we are reverting to what has been the norm. A gloomy thought, perhaps but there you have it. Even exporting this lot to europe is hardly new: the Duke of Wellington once remarked that he had little idea how the enemy saw his army but, by god, it terrified him. This was not a tribute to its fighting effectiveness but a recognition that, as he is supposed to have said, his Peninsular Army constituted "the scum of the earth". Certainly the Iron Duke acknowledged that his soldiers had their own reasons for serving the King: “People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling — all stuff — no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children — some for minor offences — many more for drink."

Indeed so. You'll recall, no doubt, that the Royal Navy only scrapped the daily rum ration in the late 1960s when some bright spark thought mixing inebriated tars with nuclear weapons could lead to trouble.

Nonetheless, Rod has a point when he mentions religious observance. Or, rather, it's the decline in all forms of authority - a decline even more pronounced, I should say, in Britain than in the United States, this generally being a vastly more cynical, grasping, coarse culture than anything the United States can boast - that must explain some of this lager loutishness. That is to say, there was a period stretching from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s in which order was imposed and the more brutish indulgences of the populace were curbed.

War and Empire may have helped and not jut because they dispatched young men to an early grave or distant corner of the globe coloured pink. The religious revival of the mid-nineteenth century coupled with expanding educational opportunities and a civic sense of improvement doubtless also played a part even if, as we've seen, complaints about the incorrigible bellicosity of the mob endured.

Still, the church's decline is more a symptom of the decline of authority and a loss of deference. Not all of this is necessarily a bad thing even if the death of shame has rather turned British towns into something akin to a boozed-up refugee camp each Saturday night. American readers might find echoes of Bourbon Street in almost every mid-sized British town each week. They don't, on the whole, behave like this on the continent.

What conclusions may be drawn from this? Well, culture matters and culture endures. In sour moments one might also wonder if this hedonistic excess also represents and escapist over-reaction to the banality of much of contemporary society. Religious folk will doubtless see the absence of god in that, but more important, I'd suggest is the fragmentation of family life, coupled with a reluctance to enforce existing laws (creating, therefore, the need for fresh legislation at every turn; honey for parliamentarians and other busy-bodies). That, and the central part booze has played in British culture (from top to bottom; think of Pitt's heroic alcohol consumption. Churchill too, for that matter.) Can it be just a coincidence that the only other people you see behaving like this at, say the Munich Beer Festival, are citizens of other anglophone and commonwealth countries?

Comments

[Anthony]

"But if one takes a longer or broader look at the matter then one realises that this sort of boorish drunkeness has been the norm, not the exception in British history.... In other words, we are reverting to what has been the norm."

I think there's an awful lot to this. In fact I've been mulling over the notion that what we're seeing today is really a Return To The 18th Century, with a Long Victorian period representing basically a hiatus. Glad to see I'm not the only person thinking in those terms.

I also think the decline of authority is central. We have an odd situation here now. We have a population that is simultaneously cynical on an epic scale and largely politically apathetic. We have a reputation abroad, particularly in the US, for playing host to a growing Nanny State, but I think what needs flagging up is that fact that the custodians and architects of said nanny state really exist as a crust floating on top of a population that simultaneously loathes their works and is increasingly set in the belief that there's nothing that can be done to change course. In political terms, I'm hardly a populist, but I do find the gap between the public and the Westminster Bubble pretty cavernous. Large sections of the electorate are now sceptical to the a degree that shades into conspiracy theory.

That said, we get the politicos we deserve, at least to a degree.

[Paul Lay]

We have to take an historical view of this subject. It is certainly true that the notorious excesses of the British were held in check from the mid-19th century until relatively recently. Strict licensing laws helped (Britain is a northern European country after all); it would be no bad thing if Britain copied the US in making 21 the minimum legal age to enter a bar. But, more importantly, the nature of drinking in Britain has changed. Up to the 1970s, the main outlet for alcohol was the pub, monitored by the landlord and older drinkers, who kept the young in check. Not that this was a difficult task, for most alcohol then was bitter and mild beer, low in alcohol, complex in taste. No one drank wine, few drank spirits, and drunkenness was a source of shame. But the drinks industry, in league with a succession of rapacious governments, have closed many of the traditional pubs, opened large town centre drinking caverns, fuelled with strong, unpleasant lagers and spirit-based sweet drinks (eg the dreaded alcopops), where seating is limited, therefore limiting genial conversation, and which seek to attract a young audience “untrained” in the consumption of alcohol. It's also worth mentioning that many more females now drink, often choosing to imbibe strong New World wines in ever larger measures. Our young drinkers have stepped outside british history, to embrace a faux continental pattern of all-day, late night drinking that's closer to modern drug use (the quick ingestion, the pursuit of oblivion rather than pleasure) than the old civilised pattern of the pub. But I fear there is no going back, so in order to combat this now frightening trend, once liberal, self-regulating Britain, will embrace authoritarianism, such is the repugnance at the way so many of our young, lost people behave.

[Anthony]

"...it would be no bad thing if Britain copied the US in making 21 the minimum legal age to enter a bar."

I disagree. It seems to me ludicrous to stamp someone, legally and otherwise, an adult and then deploy this sort of restriction on utilitarian grounds. It is ludicrous to suggest that someone be able to work, pay taxes, drive, screw, marry, raise children [though ideally not...], purchase a house, stand for election to local government and go abroad to kill and be killed for one's country but that said person is not qualified to purchase drink.

Might it make a difference in terms of binge drinking? Yes, it might. But - and this is the point that our current [and, one suspects, future, regardless of political affiliation] government misses time and again - that's not the point.

[Jimmy]

I love the fact that so many Americans appear to 'tut-tut' Britain for our love of alcohol, but which country is the most hated in the world? Which country has the highest number of murders and vicious attacks per capita of any developed country in the world? Which country has the most illterate and uneducated people over 16 of any MEDC? And finally, which country is it where a person in the street was asked, 'how many sides are their in a triangle?' and the answer received was... 'four'? Maybe if you got drunk more, America would be a lot nicer, safer and more worldly to live in....
lolroflmao