Drunk Driving and the Culture of England

LONDON and JERUSALEM — The Daily Mail reports on efforts to change British drink­ing habits and stop an increase in inci­dents like drunk dri­ving:

Such scenes are not uncom­mon, which is why Cardiff — one of the country’s worst cities for binge drink­ing — has just banned booz­ing on the streets.

The crack­down is aimed at late night rev­ellers, tar­get­ing rowdy hen and stag par­ties and gen­er­ally try­ing to make the streets safer after dark.

Police can use the new pow­ers to con­fis­cate alco­hol or arrest any­one who defies them.

The ban has been a suc­cess in tri­als in small areas but will spread across the entire city in time for Christ­mas and the New Year.

Yes­ter­day it was hailed as a big step towards ‘reclaim­ing the streets’ from drunken yobs.

Cardiff Cen­tral MP Jenny Willott said: ‘Late night alcohol-fuelled crime and anti-social behav­iour is a huge prob­lem on the streets.

‘Peo­ple deserve to have a night out with­out the fear of intim­i­da­tion or fac­ing vio­lence as a result of exces­sive alco­hol consumption.

‘This ban should help the law-abiding and respon­si­ble major­ity to reclaim the streets.’

Drunk Girls

When I lived in Lon­don in 2001 and worked as a bar­tender at the Zet­land Arms, I observed that British peo­ple drink a lot — a lot more than your aver­age Amer­i­can. But it was still within rea­son­able lim­its. Every night, the reg­u­lars — a friendly-but-sad bunch — would arrive after work and drink pint after pint while watch­ing sports. Then they would leave for home late at night and return the next evening.

Later in the evening, the drunk girls would arrive. Since pubs had to close at 12:30 a.m., they would drink a lot and then move to a club or hang out on the streets. (It is legal to drink out­side in coun­ties includ­ing Britain and Israel.) But I rarely saw any prob­lems. The clos­est I ever got was when I took the drink out of the hand of a drunken Scots­man because I was angry and he refused to leave at clos­ing time. Luck­ily, the man­ager came over and calmed him down. (One les­son of bar­tend­ing in Lon­don: If you want to befriend a Scots­man, men­tion the film “Brave­heart” in a pos­i­tive way.) I won­der if he ended up need­ing drunk-driving attor­neys or drunk-driving lawyers that night.

But, sadly, it seems that things have become much worse:

…the pro­por­tion of women who binge-drink almost dou­bled between 1998 and 2006 and is now at 15% (men who binge-drink increased by 1% to 23%). How­ever, the pro­por­tion of 16– to 24-year-old men binge-drinking decreased by 9% since 2000. Researchers also found that whilst fewer chil­dren are drink­ing, those that do drink are drink­ing much more than they did in the past.

Vio­lent crime by youths is also an increas­ing prob­lem. If the reports are cred­i­ble (I have not been to Britain since 2001), then Eng­lish cities are deal­ing with mobs of drunken, vio­lent youths every night. There seems to be some­thing in the dat­ing DNA there that makes the sin­gles scene resem­ble some­thing like dat­ing scams.

If you want to see the future of a coun­try, look at its young peo­ple. Great Britain, once known as the eco­nomic, cul­tural, and fash­ion cap­i­tal of the world, seems to be crum­bling. I first real­ized this when for­mer British Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair started giv­ing speeches sev­eral years ago defend­ing the very idea of the coun­try itself.

The still-unanswered ques­tion fac­ing Blair in the 1990s was: What does it mean to be “British” as opposed to “Eng­lish,” “Welsh,” or “Scot­tish”? The United King­dom is a polit­i­cal entity cre­ated through con­quest that has rarely, if ever, had a col­lec­tive sense of iden­tity. Blair tried, unsuc­cess­fully, to brand the coun­try as “Cool Bri­tan­nia.”

Eng­land Politics

The British Empire col­lapsed after World War II, and the British peo­ple never quite recov­ered sub­con­sciously as the United States, a for­mer colony, became the new leader of the free world. Decades leader, the British peo­ple viewed Blair as George W. Bush’s lap dog in the run-up to the inva­sion of Iraq. (In geopo­lit­i­cal terms, Blair could do lit­tle else.) It was a con­fir­ma­tion of the global humil­i­a­tion that the British peo­ple have been feel­ing after cen­turies of power and influ­ence had disappeared.

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