It’s Gin Lane all over again

28 October 2009

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Hogarth’s satire is as appropriate now as it was 250 years ago, says Dan Jones. What we need is a new approach to our age-old drinking problem

And after all that, during the supposedly improved Victorian society of the 1840s, a young Friedrich Engels could still report that ‘30,000 workers are drunk in Glasgow every Saturday night... It is particularly on Saturday evenings that such intoxication can be seen in all its bestiality, for it is then that the workers have just received their wages and go out for enjoyment at rather earlier hours than on other days of the week... on such an evening in Manchester I have seldom gone home without seeing many drunkards staggering in the road or lying helpless in the gutter... It is easy to see the consequences of widespread drunkenness — the deterioration in personal circumstances, the catastrophic decline in health and morals, the breaking up of homes.’

This is precisely the situation that David Cameron must resolve. If he does so, he will be remembered as the moral PM he aspires to be. For this reason we must hope that his party’s Gin Act works. The other option — and it must be his last resort — is expensive, illiberal and tedious NYC-style zero-tolerance policing in which the ordinary drinker is punished alongside the fat slag spilling over on the nightclub steps. This works, but it requires massive, blunt state intervention and the constant interference of petty officials in public life — which is the kind of thing that makes all right-thinking people queasy.