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Anorak News | Booze Britannia

Booze Britannia

by | 10th, August 2005

‘ANORAK has reserved the least sticky table at the Chav and Mobile public house, and when the licensing laws change in November, we will be bringing the news to the masses in a state of rare morning merriment.

‘Miss, shall I take the register again?’

But we need not have booked that early. Journalism is not what it was, and whereas in days of yore newspaper hacks would have been drooling at the prospect of 24-hour drinking, they are now deskbound and full of sobering tales of doom and gloom.

Instead of stories like “YES! YES! YES!”, “Drinking In The First Chance Saloon” and “You’re Me Bestest Mate In The Whole Wide World” we have the Telegraph’s front-page livener: “24-hour drinking lunacy, says judges.”

Documents leaked by the Home Office report that Council of Circuit Judges have spoken of “an inevitable explosion in alcohol-fuelled violence” when the new licensing laws come into force.

The judges go onto say, in a report entitled ‘Drinking Responsibly’: “Those who routinely see the consequences of drink-fuelled violence in offences of rape, grievous bodily harm and worse on a daily basis are in no doubt that an escalation of offences of this nature will be caused by the relaxation of licensing which the Government has now authorised.”

Over in the Times, Judge Charles Harris, QC, a member of the Council of Circuit Judges, gives his views.

But to save readers the bother of reading all of what the judge has to say, the paper distils his opinions into literary shots on its front page.

“For a while these people [drinkers] are simply savages, angry, blind and brutal.” And: “The situation is already grave, if not grotesque…making drinking facilities more widely available is close to lunacy.”

The thought of Britain turning into a giant Faliraki, one of many resorts overtaken by pissed-up Britons each year, lacks a certain appeal.

As a paper from the Association of Chief Police Officers says: “One only has to look to popular holiday destinations to see the effect of allowing British youth unrestricted access to alcohol.”

Although it must be said that the key difference is that when they are on these holiday destinations, the drunk and often debauched yoof are on, er, holiday.

They have no work to get up for and no college essays to hand in. What’s more, getting ‘em out for the lads and it out for the ladies holds more appeal when the sun is shining and your body is tanned than it does on a freezing cold school night in Bradford…’



Posted: 10th, August 2005 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink