LONDON – It’s enough to drive a person to drink.
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government is planning to enact a law this month removing limits on operating hours for the nation’s 60,000 pubs, a measure denounced by critics as a license to swill.
The prospect of longer drinking hours has provoked upheaval across Britain as police and neighborhood groups battle against the nation’s powerful alcohol-service industry to scotch the measure.
The government argues that Britain’s current law, which requires pubs to stop serving drinks at 11 p.m., promotes binge drinking because pubgoers typically race the clock to down an extra pint or two before last call. The law took effect during World War I when the drinking appetites of factory workers were deemed harmful to the war effort.
Skeptics of the proposed law are everywhere. Even the chairman of J.D. Wetherspoon, a large pub chain, said the measure was ill-conceived.
“The morons in the Home Office thought it would be sexy to go for 24-hour licensing. It was never an idea which emerged from pubs,” Tim Martin, chairman of the 600-pub chain, told Britain’s Press Association news agency in January. “To me, this all seems like last-minute chaos.”
Neighborhood groups across the United Kingdom are joining police associations in condemning the plan. Those who live near pubs say they already must tolerate late-night drunken mayhem and spend weekend mornings tiptoeing over sidewalks littered with broken bottles and vomit.
“I don’t think it’s going to work. I think they’re making a big mistake,” said Lais Tolessi, manager of The Tabard pub in west London.
“It’s just going to make the situation worse and worse,” Tolessi said. “Because people drink, they get into all sorts of trouble. They fight, they get loud, they go home shouting and singing in the streets,” she said. “They’re having a good time when other people are trying to sleep.”
The Association of Chief Police Officers said that the law would counteract police efforts to curb a “binge-drinking culture” in Britain. “The result will be more crime and disorder” and a significant increase in police workloads.
Two alcohol-addiction specialists at the University of West England, Dr. Martin Plant and his daughter, Emma J. Plant, published a study last month warning that Britain could be heading toward disaster.
“The U.K. has a serious “alcohol problem.’ This really requires a far more coherent and consistent response designed to alleviate the associated health and social problems,” the report said. They cited research from Europe, Iceland, Australia and North America linking liberalized bar-operating hours to “rises in alcohol consumption, violent crime, traffic accidents, illicit drug use as well as extra public health and tourism costs.”
But the condemnation is not unanimous.
Bill Joyce, owner of The Shanakee pub in the west London district of Ealing, said most critics of the new law “know nothing of what they’re talking about.”
“People still only have a certain amount of money to spend,” he said, scoffing at assertions that the law would lead people to drink 24 hours a day.
Under current law, they are pressured to spend and drink quickly, but with the new law, “they’ll have more time to spend it.”
Pub hours are not the problem, he contended.
“There should be no happy hours and no discounted drinks, because you’re only encouraging people toward binge drinking,” he said.
Dr. Martin Plant said there is a deeper problem that won’t be solved by eliminating happy hours or changing pub-operating times.
“Part of it is social attitudes and cultural expectations,” which have given Britons a reputation across Europe for obnoxious, out-of-control drunkenness.
He said British history is rife with examples, as far back as the Battle of Hastings in 1066, of wartime defeats being blamed on alcohol.
In 1915, the soon-to-be prime minister, David Lloyd George, listed Britain’s three main foes in World War I as “Germans, Austrians and Drink.” The British statesman added, “As far as I can see, the greatest of these foes is Drink.”
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