The British are, it is true, becoming more continental in their drinking habits. They drink much more alcohol than they did even 40 years ago, and they have moved away from beer towards wine. But that doesn’t mean that we are turning into a caf? society — how and why we drink is more complicated than that.
In the 1970s we were a sober nation compared with the rest of Europe, perhaps as a legacy of the Second World War, the feeling of austerity that lingered after that and the residual effect of the temperance movement. Wine was expensive, probably not very good and it was unusual to drink it. Then people started to travel in Europe, brought back Chianti — and dared to learn to drink wine.
This was the beginning of the pattern that is now established of drinking more, drinking more wine and drinking at home. Between 1985 and 2000 our wine consumption almost doubled, though we still drink less than they do in France. Greater numbers of people die from cirrhosis and alcoholic liver disease in France than in Britain, but we don’t tend to see that, we just see the French tradition of long, sedate lunches rather than social order problems.
In Britain it’s rare to drink at lunchtime — the quick sandwich at the desk has become the norm. So some aspects of our lives are becoming drier, but then we probably go home and share a bottle of wine.
When the Home Office says that it’s worried about drinking competitions that offer free drinks, and bars that encourage people to drink when they’re already drunk, we assume that problem drinking involves people falling over in city centres. What the Home Office is talking about is the link between binge drinking and social order, rather than drinking and health, which is a more complex issue.
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Figures for drunkenness are always interesting because they depend on the police charging you. There are plenty of drunks out there who are a bit wobbly going upstairs to bed, who don’t break anything. The biggest change in drinking habits is the increase in the drinking of wine, most of which is drunk by ABCs and a lot of it at home. The House of Commons select committee looking at this issue blames supermarkets, which first became licensed in the early 1960s and began selling to women who would not dare to enter a pub or off-licence. The enormous rise in wine consumption from the 1980s is assumed to be down to women drinking — partly a new assertiveness but also reflecting their increasing importance as wage-earners. Drinking at home seems safer and easier for many women than going to a pub.
This is what will stop us becoming a 24-hour caf? society. People are happy drinking at home, where they don’t pay pub or restaurant prices. The British are good at staying at home — most people now have informal dining kitchens, which encourage informal eating and drinking, and we see aspirational lifestyle and cookery programmes on TV. Why not have a nice meal, open a bottle of wine? It doesn’t sound unreasonable, but the Department of Health would say that it adds up to a health problem. Yet this has become the cultural norm for all generations.
There is also a strong connection between prosperity and alcohol consumption in Britain: house prices and alcohol consumption follow similar lines in the UK. Today the number of people who say that they don’t drink in this country is rising, probably for health and religious reasons and perhaps because of incentives offered by insurance companies. It’s probably the case that those who do drink are drinking more, though overall rates have fallen in the past few years, possibly because of the recession.
Will British drinkers take any notice of the Government? The radical change in attitude to drink driving in recent decades shows that this can happen, though it is believed that the effectiveness of the Government’s campaign on this was because it happened to chime with the public perception of what was acceptable. If we are falling out of love with alcohol, this is a good time to intervene. If not,
I suspect that the Government’s intervention will fail.
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James Kneale is senior lecturer in the Department of Geography at University College London. He gave evidence to the House of Commons Health Committee and was quoted in its First Report on Alcohol this year.