April 16, 2004, 9:45 a.m.
Drinking to Forget

In a startling moment of clarity — the kind of painful moment that follows a night of binge drinking, no doubt — the British were shocked to discover recently that they had a drinking problem. On weekend nights drunks take to the streets where they fight, hurl, and pass out in gutters.

Last month, the BBC reported that the government was trying to convince drinkers to become more French in their drinking habits. We want a "continental café-bar culture" a Labour minister said. But the punters have yet to take to sipping Fernet-Branca and discussing Sartre, and the U.K. press is concerned: What could possibly cause such a thing? Is it a sign of rising despair? Or is it a symptom of declining morality? Neither. The British spirits industry, according to the Guardian, is convinced that commercials are persuading otherwise innocent Britons to drink bingefully.

The Portman Group, which, as the paper reports, is "the body set up by the alcohol industry to campaign for sensible drinking" issued a report complaining "the standards applied to drinks advertising [have] became so relaxed that many TV ads are breaking industry-wide rules." The report cited a couple of vodka manufacturers who were guilty of "associating their products with sexual performance through packaging and branding." Packaging and branding? The code also prohibits "scenes showing drinks being consumed quickly."

As my faithful reader will recall, one of the many career potholes along this thoroughfare of woe I call a life was my employment as a barman in London. My job was to pour pints, then sing cowboy songs at closing time. The landlord, Michael Smith, discovered that my rendition of "Git Along Little Doggies" cleared the place of drunks much, much faster than his shouts of "Time, please." Nothing else was quite so conducive to producing a scene showing drinks being consumed quickly as my semi-yodel.

I am therefore an expert on irresponsible drinking, yet even though the government has created an "alcohol harm reduction strategy" to contain the problem — which, as this Guardian report notes, costs the U.K some $37 billion per year — I have heard from no one seeking my sober wisdom. Too bad, because my solution is simple and cheap: Since binge drinking suggests drinking to excess at occasional intervals, the government should run commercials encouraging a more or less consistent level of drunkenness.

Instead, the British are simply staggering away from the problem — a solution with unintended benefits. According to a dossier of articles, including this one in the Daily Telegraph this week, the Brits have "had enough of life in Britain." Slowly, methodically, they are leaving the U.K. and invading and conquering their two fiercest and most ancient of foes. That would be France and Spain, where the British are engaging in binge-property acquisition.

With nearly a million U.K. expats already on the ground there and elsewhere, victory must be nigh — and a leader in the paper reports that 20 million more are thinking of bailing out of Britain. The Telegraph warns against such foolishness, neatly listing all the reasons why any sensible person would want to stay in Old Blighty: "...a climate that offers us a bit of everything (but nothing too extreme); the best foreign restaurants in the world; country pubs; the queen; plenty to grouse about; a tradition of tolerance; the Daily Telegraph; freedom of a sort; and even the ability to pop frequently over the Channel, safe in the knowledge that we can easily return." Some list. No BBC. No C of E. No National Health Service. No binge drinking.

Whatever, the sudden appearance of large numbers of Anglos is causing mucho happiness in Spain, the paper says. The Spaniards, not surprisingly, seem delighted to make a little business selling Marmite and condos to pasty people in loose shorts and black shoes.

But in vile and mirthless France, the British are breeding nothing but melancholy resentment, as this report shows. It seems les Anglais have arrived in bulk, purchased huge chunks of dour Brittany, and, as the paper reports, are now making life hard for the indigenous peoples: "'The problem is they are pushing up property prices and we locals just can't keep up,' said Gaston, 37, amid sips of a morning beer."

In my neck of France, so many properties are being shopped by Brits that local realtors have added English-speaking agents to help explain the charms of ramshackle farmhouses made of sticks and mud to English gentlefolk. Sometimes, there are misunderstandings. Take, for example, the poor, middle-aged woman from London who had bought a bar on a corner of the battlefield at Agincourt.

According to her friends, it was a set up. They told me she had been lured there after suffering the death of her child by an evil cousin who, in cahoots with the local mayor, told her all about the thousands of Britons who visit the place every year to toast one of England's most memorable victories over the French, when Henry V's small but heroic band of English archers, outnumbered five to one and suffering from diarrhea so bad they fought without their pants on, defeated the flower of French aristocracy under crazy Charles VI on St Crispin's day in 1415. Trouble is, the only drinking place in that part of France was indelibly French.

So the woman sold everything she owned, then added it to a small inheritance she had recently gained, moved to Agincourt and bought the café. Financially, she was clueless; linguistically, she was Frenchless. But according to her friends, she was systematically milked of every last penny by unscrupulous locals, then abandoned by everyone she trusted — including her husband — and sent back to London in poverty and tears. As Brian Micklethwaite's "libertarian inclined education blog" notes, the café was subsequently re-sold by the mayor to a British school and it's now being used as a study center. The new director is a very charming Englishwoman, with whom I shared a very bingeless glass or two of earthy Touraine recently. So in the second Battle of Agincourt, the French may have won — but only temporarily. Teetotalers won the war.

But that victory will be as meaningless to France as Henry's was to England. What good does it do to win back one café for a few months when the English are occupying huge tracts of Pas de Calais, crowding the restaurants, driving up the property values, careering down the roads in their left-hand drive autos and taking over the villages in the famous Sept Vallées? I'm certain there are now more Britons living in France than at any time in the last 400 years. Some French villages, I'm told, are now almost entirely British. One has an English mayor. Writers and artists are once again bolting to the continent; Theodore Dalrymple recently told Spectator readers that he too was joining the Chunnel exodus in search of a higher civilization. Whole boatloads of Brits are bringing their famous brown teeth to France for a bit of dentistry, according to the Guardian. Earlier this year, a retired Londoner gave me tea in his garden in Tramecourt and said, "I love it here. It reminds me of the England of my youth."

Almost. All the place needs, obviously, are a few good pubs, some binge drinking — and of course an American at closing time.

ITEMS

One more reason to leave Britain. Channel 4 is going to show aborted children on TV in a broadcast scheduled for the end of the month, according to the Observer.

Power play. Most Britons, sensibly, think the EU's a crock of bureaucracy and want as little to do with it as possible. An increasing number of French feel the same way, along with others who seem to grow disenchanted with the scandal-plagued scam-for-all-reasons. If the Little Shop of Horrors sold trade treaties, it would sell the EU. In the Guardian, David Clark, a leftwing British F.O. type, writes about the noble calling of the European Union: "The desire to replace the existing unipolar world order with a multipolar alternative is, they say, an example of crude anti-Americanism. It is a familiar smear, yet those who make it rarely feel the need to justify it. How is it that the demand for a more equal distribution of global power can be translated into an expression of blind prejudice?" Beats me. How is it that the phrase "a more equal distribution of global power" can be translated into French?

A tale of two hostages. In Italy, Il Giornale reports that terrorists in Iraq killed an Italian hostage. France's Europe 1 reports that terrorists in Iraq released a French hostage. Hours later, according to Le Nouvel Observateur, Osama bin Laden released a tape offering a "truce" to European nations willing to follow the lead of France and John Kerry and oppose U.S. policy in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph is urging Blair to remain on-message as he prepares to visit Bush in Washington Friday, even as U.S.-U.K. differences are reported elsewhere in the paper.

More than Muslims. My remark that Muslim thugs were responsible for the terrorism in Kosovo directed against the minority Serbs drew a few requests for a clarification, which I here make: The Kosovar thugs are as much if not more interested in Kosovar nationalism than in the teachings of the prophet.

Stairway to heaven. In the U.K., newspaper reporters are loathe to openly criticize the BBC's loopy news judgment since the only step up from newspapering is working for the BBC. Then what? Then you get real, forget all your anti-American goofiness and quit as a top BBC exec in order to go to America and run the Discovery Network, where the ratings are buoyed almost solely by American Chopper. The Guardian has the story. Awesome to think that Senior and Junior could send this woman back to London just by getting in a bad mood and saying, "No."

— Denis Boyles writes the weekly EuroPress Review column for NRO.