Darn tootin’ I’m cross, Jonah. To revert to my vernacular, your correspondent is talking bollocks. Saying that Thatcherism was a mere copy of American yuppy-ism displays a breathtaking ignorance of the history of British conservative thought in the 1960s and 70s. Edward Heath himself was elected on a platform similar to Thatcher’s in 1970, although he balked when the Trades Unions objected. A Heath government with testicular fortitude would have gone down much the same path.
As for the actual alcohol question, a friend of mine said over ten years ago that “The right to keep and bear alcohol is a central part of the British constitution.” No serious historian of Britain can deny the fact that Britain, unlike its neighbors, has always had a drinking culture. According to Peter Ackroyd’s excellent London: The Biography, by the 14th century there were 1,334 breweries in the city. Drunkenness was such a problem in 1574 that two hundred alehouses were suppressed. Barmen were immortalized in Ben Jonson’s plays and an early tour guide from 1609 pointed out the imprtance of learning their names. By the next century, bitter had become the tipple of choice, so bitter that that proud European Casanova could not drink it. One historian says that then, “the consumption of strong drink was connected with every phase of life from apprenticeship.” At 12, Charles Dickens entered a Public House in Parliament Street and ordered, “your very best – the VERY best – ale.” He was rewarded with a glass of Genuine Stunning, with a good head. In the 1850s, Henry Mayhew wrote, “The girls…are generally fonder of gin than the boys,” taking it “to keep the cold out.” Throughout the 19th century, 25,000 Londoners were arrested each year for public drunkenness.
What of the European attitude to this? Verlaine considered Londoners “noisy as ducks, eternally drunk.” Dostoevsky – “everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility.” German journalist Max Schelsinger (1852) described the denizens of one pub as “standing, staggering, crouching or lying down, groaning and cursing, drink and forget.” On the other hand, European visitors expressed admiration and awe at the size and scale of London’s principal breweries.
Ackroyd actually voices the suspicion that current levels of intoxication are actually a return to old habits. I think he’s right.
Praise God and pass the port.