Boozed Up Britain?

Apparently it's all the fault of the supermarkets. The end of civilisation as we know it, that is. If the likes of Tesco didn't go around selling cheap alcohol to all and sundry then we wouldn't be blighted with binge drinking. Drunken teenagers wouldn't be hanging around our street corners waiting to murder passers-by. Booze-fuelled anti social behaviour would be a thing of the past. Or so the government would have us believe. Now, I'm afraid that this is an assertion that I really have to take issue with, on several counts. Firstly, and most importantly - exactly where in the average supermarket can I find this cheap booze? OK, I know that you can buy that economy own-brand lager and bitter, but that surely doesn't count, does it? I mean, it's virtually undrinkable - you're better off just pouring it straight down the toilet and cutting out the middle man. All the regular brand name beers are still pretty pricey. Sure, I know that they're still cheaper than they are in the pub, but that isn't difficult.

All of which brings me to my second point - the hoodies on the street most certainly aren't getting tanked up on Sainsbury's own brand piss water. Apart from the fact that it is disgusting, it is also so weak that they'd have to drink gallons of the stuff to get even mildly tipsy, let alone completely shit-faced. No, in my experience, they tend to drink the regular stuff, the strong lagers with a high alcohol content. The expensive strong lagers. Binge drinking and anti social behaviour on our streets has very little to do with the availability of cheap alcohol. Taking the two things separately, binge drinking seems to go on in nightclubs and bars (if the tabloids are to be believed) where, as we've already noted, alcohol prices are extortionate. As for those disaffected teenagers prowling our streets in a state of inebriation, surely the key question is why they indulge in such behaviour? What is its root causes? The drinking is just a symptom of a deeper malaise, not the cause. Perhaps the fact that they have nothing else to do is part of it - thanks to our health and safety obsession it's even too dangerous for them to play football in parks. Actually, there's a large part of the problem - most of the teenage activities considered as 'normal' only a few years ago, are now classified as 'anti social'. We've criminalised them before they've even done anything. But hey, what do I know? I've probably had too much of that cheap booze from Asda...