British boozing takes a serious toll

International Herald Tribune

By Sarah Lyall The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11, 2006


LONDON Britons have long been known for their love of alcohol and their belief that among the naturally repressed drinking is an essential prelude to relaxation and joie de vivre.

Shakespeare's plays are teeming with merry, sozzled characters who are at their funniest, punniest and bawdiest when drunk.

But Britons are just as notorious for their tendency to segue seamlessly from drinking into brawling, to overdo it and then behave like loutish hooligans.

This sets them apart from even their hard-drinking counterparts in Northern Europe and causes widespread dismay among health care workers and police officers forced to deal with drinking-related illness, injury and crime. Part of the problem is that in British pubs, now able to stay open later under a recent law, drinking is not a Continental-style accompaniment to a meal or conversation, but an end in itself.

"You'd never find Sartre in an English café for two reasons," the writer George Steiner is quoted as telling Jeremy Paxman, in Paxman's book "The English" - "A, no Sartre. B, no café."

The country's confused attitude toward drinking, its habit of celebrating it and condemning it by turns, was evident last week when Charles Kennedy, the convivial leader of the Liberal Democratic party, resigned from his leadership post after admitting he was an alcoholic. While he claimed that he was cured, members of his party said that his drinking - never a secret - had finally so hampered his political performance that they had lost confidence in him.

There were several key parliamentary debates, for example, for which Kennedy simply failed to show up, forcing aides to fill in for him at the last minute. There was a disastrous, sweating, stumbling speech at a party conference, another debacle at the London School of Economics and a time when he gave almost incoherent answers to a reporter asking basic policy questions. His aides always blamed fatigue or illness for his behavior, but it was clear to those who knew him that Kennedy could not hold his liquor.

Kennedy's problem was not drunkenness per se, but an impolitic failure to function effectively while drunk. British politics has historically been full of men who drink and are proud of it, too. William Pitt the Younger liked a bottle or three of port a day. The late Alan Clark, a minister and bon vivant in Margaret Thatcher's Tory government, described in his diaries about how, after sharing three bottles of wine with a friend, he found himself publicly "sneering at the more cumbrous and unintelligible passages" in the party-written speech he was then called on to deliver in Parliament. "Helter-skelter I galloped through the text," he writes, with some pride. "Sometimes I turned over two pages at once, sometimes three." Although a fellow legislator rebuked him for being "in this condition" (it is considered poor manners to actively accuse another member of being drunk, and the insult "not sober" was reportedly banned in 1945), Clark did not lose his job.

Churchill began each day with a whisky and soda; he "slurped through the war on a tidal wave of Champagne and brandy," writes Ben Macintyre in the Times of London. Drink also featured heavily in the life of George Brown, a Labour foreign secretary in the 1960s, who is once said to have stumblingly invited a guest in flowing purple robes at a reception in Peru to dance. But it was not to be.

"First, you are drunk," the guest is said to have replied. "Second, this is not a waltz; it is the Peruvian national anthem. And third, I am not a woman; I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima."

For Britons, alcohol is a relaxant, an emollient, a crutch, an excuse. In her book "Watching the English," the social anthropologist Kate Fox argues that drinking does not turn English people into unattractive louts, but rather allows them to express the unattractive loutishness latent in their character: in other words, they drink so that they will have license to behave badly.

"By blaming the booze, we sidestep the uncomfortable question of why the English, so widely admired for their courtesy, reserve and restraint, should also be renowned for their oafishness, crudeness and violence," Fox writes. Their antics have earned them a notoriety across Europe, from northern cities where boozed-up Britons go on bachelor weekends to southern resorts where young people on package tours disgust the locals by their fighting, vandalism and public displays of vomiting and al fresco sex.

The British tendency to binge on alcohol is taking a toll on the nation's health. Last week, The Lancet medical journal reported that in the last half-century, Britain has had the largest increase in Europe of deaths from cirrhosis of the liver, an effect of excessive drinking. While cirrhosis-related deaths in other European countries have declined by 20 to 30 percent since the 1970s, cirrhosis deaths among men in Scotland doubled in the 1990s; among British women, it increased by almost half.

Such statistics are reported regularly in newspapers like the Daily Mail, which has given extensive coverage to the problems of drunken behavior in British city centers and which opposed the new licensing law. But the Mail and other popular newspapers cannot make up their minds where they stand. Their pages are also full of admiring reports about the inebriated antics of pop stars and other celebrities. The puerile, alcohol-fueled behavior of the contestants on shows like "Big Brother" is presented as amusing and high-spirited rather than alarming and depressing.

This fall, when the English cricket team defeated Australia in the epic series known as the Ashes, the players embarked on a 36-hour orgy of drunken carousing in dozens of different bars. Andrew Flintoff, the star of the series, boasted to the Sun about how he "drank and drank and drank," appearing on national television with muddied speech, bloodshot eyes and an unsteady gait.

Writing approvingly in the Daily Star tabloid, Michael Booker said that the cricket team had validated the behavior of ordinary Britons who "enjoy one too many sherbets every now and again." Although binge drinking is not a good idea all the time, Booker added, "now and again the only thing that will really do - and I won't be popular with Mrs. Booker by saying this - is a pant-wetting, day-night blowout."

Since then, the English cricket team has stumbled. But in that brief, shining moment of inebriated celebration, they seemed to be saying that in Britain, it does not matter how much you drink, as long as you do your job.