It is of course oppressive and stupid. Stupidity number one is because you have a load of half-cut idiots strolling around towns carrying an extremely important and sought-after document. The alternative is to pay yet more money for other expensive ID documents.
Oppressiveness: the civil rights stuff. Establishments display material which states blithely that you will be checked if you look as if you are under 25. At that age, I was a social worker with responsibility for children and families, mental health and adult welfare, and there are plenty more of that age now doing the same. Why should anyone aged 18-25 be subjected to this? (n.b. we had two German exchange students here who were mildly horrified that the age was not sixteen, as in Germany. Now, they know a bit about drinking in Germany..........)
Why pick this as an argument, rather than something more sober, such as ID cards in general, or “Mosquitoes”? Because it is clear that someone simply does not like it. There is a suspicion that they simply do not like the inherent hedonism in drinking: I want fun, and I want it now. I suppose that this is to be set against a vision of a risk-free society, where school students are enjoined to embrace the work ethic as soon as possible and behave like a bunch of responsible, goal-orientated merchant bankers. Pint of Lehman Brothers’ Special, anyone?
Concurrently, you have what appears to be a campaign against both drinking in general, and against young people (ghastly phrase; I would have ripped my own head off, rather than be called that), and specifically against young people drinking.
Stupidity number two is the perverse effect of the whole policy. They have made it more difficult for people to get into the pub (or where ever) under age. This has had a perverse effect. Not so long ago, you went to a suitable pub aged 16-17, and bought a few drinks. Above all else, you tried not to draw attention to yourself; you were obliged to behave like one of the older drinkers. In effect, you learned how to sit around drinking and talking without looking overtly wrecked. In short, you were socialised into behaving like a more grown-up drinker. As long as you caused no trouble (and yes, there were some places where that happened, but it would have happened anyway) you were OK.
What of now? They get hold of cheap alcohol and neck it as fast as possible, in order to get off on it, in the park or where they can; crude generalisation, but drinking to auto-destruct is learned early, rather than being socialised into pub-going.
The figures on binge-drinking are probably debatable. There was a sheepish admission that the 21 unit per week (it was 28 at some stage, I thought) figure was really only a result of there being seven days in the week. In 1995 or thereabouts, when this figure was produced, mate Rick, then a senior consultant at St Georges in Tooting, South London (and one partial to a few drinks) asked his colleagues from various departments where the hell had this come from, and what was the evidence............scratching of senior medical heads, and mumbling “dunno....there isn’t any”. A little later, I went to look over a project promoting volunteering with the Scottish Council on Alcohol on behalf of the funder, the Home Office. Waiting to interview various staff members, I read in their newsletter that they had asked the Scottish Medical Officer of Health the same question, and received the honest, and identical reply: there is no hard evidence for 21 or even 28 units. Yet this is now the benchmark by which excess is measured.
This does not mean that drinking a bottle of whisky a day would be fine (it never was), nor does it mean that alcohol-fuelled violence is fine; but there are laws against violence already, are there not? Drunkenness in the streets on a Friday night has been around for a very long time. “Young people” did not invent it; to repeat, the campaign against them is oppressive and stupid. There are more arguments and evidence (George Monbiot took this up in the Guardian) but let’s just stick to one for now:-
modern life is rubbish.........................
