Drink: The British Disease?

In May 2004 the prime minister Tony Blair gave a speech warning that binge drinking could become a ‘new British disease’. Alcohol consumption had risen steeply over the preceding decade and evidence emerged that Britain had some of the highest rates of binge drinking in Europe. Furthermore, a proliferation of bars belonging to national chains appeared to have turned many city centres into sites of nightly drunken chaos. At the same time, the Daily Mail newspaper launched a campaign opposing the implementation of the 2003 Licensing Act, focusing on the removal of statutory licensing hours and the prospect of 24-hour drinking that this entailed. ‘Binge Britain’ became a common catchphrase, one that implied an underlying relationship between Britishness and the bottle.