All-day drinking 'a failure'

I can feel an 'I told you so' moment coming on. Give me a moment to lie down hoping it'll pass .... There. Now, All-day drinking 'a failure' - Home News, UK - Independent.co.uk: "The report, to be released on Tuesday, will reveal that the transition to a southern European-style drinking culture – a key aim of the controversial legislation – has failed to materialise since the Licensing Act was introduced two years ago. It will also show that there are no 'clear signs yet that the abolition of a standard closing time [for pubs and clubs] has significantly reduced problems of crime and disorder'."
Now the key thing here is the whole culture thing. It is clear that there is a huge socio-cultural dimension to this in fact, I think, one going back a long long way. So the difficulty is that if you change the opportunities without changing the mindset you're likely to get what apparently we have got: the opportunity is used to abuse further.

Now, I agree with the idea of striving for a more south European drinking culture. I just don't think that extending hours is going to achieve that without things that would encourage a change of mindset and attitudes. What we need to do first is note how 'heroic' drinking is narrated in certain subcultures: the implicit message is that drinking a lot is a giver of social status. Listen too to the unchallenged assumption that in order to have a good time you have to drink to drunkenness. The strange effect of this latter is that the proof of a good night out is the hangover and even the (alleged) lack of memory of events. Of course, the latter is probably quite commonly a way to avoid taking responsibility for more embarrassing or bizarre actions. In fact, the absolution from responsibility for our actions is probably part of the mystique. There is quite literally at this point, a religious or spiritual dimension to it. There's a dionysian loss of self-regard and a mythical return to innocency.

But it is a myth in anthropological terms: a story to frame action which operates ideologically and therefore obscures matters in some areas too. In this case the cost is widely played down and woe betide the killjoy who may draw attention to some of them: health, morality, family-life and the fact that it is a kind of tax on the uninformed and deprived, profiting people who run the drinks companies and their shareholders ...

So, one of the things we have to do is to challenge the myths, perhaps on their own terms. Stories of how a good time can be had without tanking up, perhaps. We also need role-modelling of other ways. Of course, once upon a time the temperance movement did much of this. I'm not sure whether that tactic could work again, and I'm dubious about the way that it turned peoples' heads exegetically; bringing about the hermeneutic contortions to try to demonstrate 'wine' wasn't wine and that Jesus didn't drink alcohol.

So let's try to change things, but let's be aware, you can't have this kind of cultural change on the cheap. It was to try to curtail the excesses of widespread alcohol abuse that things like the restricted licensing hours were brought in in the first place. Wasn't it?