Keep The Bars Open Later & We'll Be Nicer

This story about the British and their pubs made me shake my head.

"LONDON -- It all seemed like such a good idea when the government proposed the law change in 2001: Eliminate Britain's notorious 11 p.m. bar closing times, and the nation would become a more civilized place.

Nightlife would thrive; residents and tourists alike would drink and eat continental-style into the early hours; and, most important, the British would start to lose their international reputation for drinking too heavily and getting into trouble. This was, after all, the 21st Century, nearly 100 years after the 11 p.m. closing was imposed to keep munitions workers producing shells for World War I.

But that was 2001. Four years later and with the deadline for licensing applications under the pending law nearing, there are screams of alarm throughout the news media, police, courts and parliamentary circles that allowing Britons to drink longer will make matters worse. They will, so the new argument goes, get more drunk over more time, cause more trouble and fill up more hospitals, courtrooms and jails."

Ok, call me crazy but I kind of suspect that the latter paragraph makes more sense. Give people more time to get drunk and watch the lunacy on the streets increase. Especially if the following is true:

"Binge drinking is considered so bad in England and Wales that senior judges have told the government's Home Office to expect alcohol-fueled violence to soar when the new law allows bars to stay open up to 24 hours a day.

"The situation is already grave, if not grotesque," wrote Warwick Judge Charles Harris in a report to the Home Office. "And to facilitate this by making drinking facilities more widely available is close to lunacy. It simply means that our towns and city centers are abandoned every night to tribes of pugnacious, drunk, noisy, vomiting louts."

But even the conservative Daily Telegraph has said it is not the pub hours that are the problem, it's the British character.

Culture of non-teetotalers

"There is no doubt we have a problem in this country in the way we drink alcohol," said a Telegraph editorial. "This is partly a lack of personal responsibility: We have never quite caught the continental habit of combining sensible amounts of wine with the related pleasures of fine food."

Historically, the British have been among Europe's heaviest drinkers, statistically imbibing not quite as much as the Germans or Finns but drinking heavily in short bursts."

One of these days I'll blog about my experiences in various pubs as I routinely slammed the sport of soccer/football as being a children's game suggested that if the hooligans really were men they wouldn't need such stupid excuses to run wild.

There is nothing like attacking the fragile male ego, trust me, I know.