Britain 'a nation of George Bushes'

Members of Alcoholics Anonymous are fond of the citing the following: 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result.' Yet that is what we in Britain are about to do, with the new 24-hour licensing law that comes into effect tomorrow. We've been here before, but noone seems to realise it, and the potential results are terrifying.

Back in 1830, the Beer Act freed up trade in the selling of beer in the same way that 24-hour opening could be about to do here. The results were the predictable increases in crime and drinking that even the Government has admitted will be similar short-term consequences here. Only they weren’t short term then, and they won’t be now.

Within eight years of the passing of the Beer Act, 46,000 beer houses had opened, doubling the number of licensed premises. This phenomenal growth continued until 1869, when the licensing laws that served so well to protect the peaceful and hard-working and sleep-valuing citizens of society until tomorrow, began to be introduced.

The excuse then was legitimate. The legislators of 1830 believed beer was little more toxic than water and, as a result of bad sanitation, it was arguably healthier, the fermenting process having killed the germs. They wanted people to drink beer rather than gin, because gin was wreaking havoc among the poor, as Hogarth’s Gin Lane, a dramatic sketch of a baby plunging to its death, dropped by a sotten mother, illustrates so graphically. At one temperance meeting in Bristol, a minister actually set fire to a glass of gin, to prove its demonic spiritual nature, and demonstrated the purity of a glass of beer by trying and failing to set fire to that as well.

And my goodness, didn’t the public switch to beer, and not by halves. There were no half measures then. The policy worked all too well.

Drunkenness increased massively, along with violent and riotous behaviour. The victims of this were more often the women, left penniless subjected to beatings by drunk husbands no longer capable of work. Life for the working classes was short, brutal, nasty and drunk. Of course, one added bonus of the Beer Act, that might not have escaped this Government’s notice, was that with everyone dying off so young through alcohol poisoning, murder by drunk husbands and all them other related alcoholic ills, there were no pensions for anyone to worry about. (Or am I being just too cynical there?)

But even that, with its massive catalogue of chaos and human misery, was not the most dramatic effect of the Beer Act.

What it did of much longer significance was give rise to the Temperance Movement. The middle classes were confronted by escalating scenes of drunken horror on their front doorsteps, scenes not dissimilar to those experienced by anyone unfortunate enough to be sidestepping the pools of vomit in Soho on a Friday evening any time after 9pm, or indeed almost any pedestrianised town or city centre in Britain.

Fuelling the Methodist and evangelical revival as never before, and also as a by-product of it, the Victorians hurled themselves into attempting to sober up these unfortunates. Everyone thinks self-help is a cult of the new millennium but as far back as the 1830s, one Mayor of Chester proclaimed: 'Self-help is of all help the best because it brings with it mainly satisfaction of difficulties subdued.' The history of this movement is told well in an award-winning paper by Rebecca Smith, that you can read here.

However, if sobering up Britain was its aim, the Temperance Movement was not successful in the long term.

It also gave rise to the disastrous experiment in Prohibition in the US, and no-one with any sense would argue for prohibition today. My own great-great grandfather, Liverpool MP and philanthropist William Rathbone, was sent by the Government to the US as the member of a working party to explore the impact of its policies on alcohol at a time when that country was beginning to move towards Prohibition. Thankfully, they recommended that Prohibition was not a solution to rising drunkenness.)

But the Temperance Movement did have many successful offshoots, religious and secular.

Out of the movement was born the Oxford Group, in around 1908. It was begun by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania who went on to found Moral Rearmament, still going strong as Initiatives of Change. Buchman was later somewhat discredited when he appeared to sympathise with the Nazis, having compared Hitler favourably to Stalin. But he did leave one lasting, powerful legacy to society.

At his Oxford Group meetings, begun in Oxford and Cambridge in the UK and later moved to the US, members focused upon changing the world, "One Person at a Time". They "surrendered" on their knees and gave testimony of their deliverance from their "sin" of alcoholism. And it was at one of these meetings where Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous along with a fellow drunk called Dr Bob, first got sober.

Wilson, like all alcoholics a deeply flawed man, decided that the Oxford Group's insistence on absolutes in everything, from honesty to sexual purity, was just too much for him to live up to. He left and went on to found a more liberal version in AA, developing the first ever Twelve Step Programme, with its basis in surrender, confession, helping others, and belief in God or a 'higher power'.

All this was drawn directly from his experience in Buchman's Oxford Group, which had worked like no doctor or hospital had and got him sober. So we can see how the Oxford Group came out of the Temperance Movement, and the Temperance Movement came out of the massive destabilising effects of the Beer Act of 1830.

Hundreds of thousands of former drunks are now sober and attending AA meetings across the world. Most of these are in the US, where a vast proliferation of other 12-step programmes have sprung up, modelled on AA, and dealing with everything from sex to shopping and crime addictions.

And who is the most famous product of this culture of sobriety in the US? Why, none other than George Bush, who decided to stop drinking in July 1986 and 14 years later found himself as President of the United States. (This post of mine is frightening enough already without even mentioning Alastair Campbell, another famous ex-drunk, and where recovery led him and this country.)

Bush didn't join AA, or if he did he has remained successfully anonymous like few other members. But in a culture where it had long ceased to be a stigma to confess to being a recovering alcoholic, thanks to the proliferation of AA groups and members, and where sobriety had become fashionable on the celebrity circuit even in the 1980s, perhaps he didn't need to.

So there is a direct line from the Beer Act of 1830 straight to George Bush, President of the United States. In our new communications age, where everything happens so much faster and at greater intensity, it will not take another 176 years to get there again. In any case, all the mechanisms are now in place. Thanks to the Beer Act and all it led to, drunkenness need no longer lead a person to the cemetery or the lunatic asylum. Instead, after drunkenness, for increasing numbers of lucky alcoholics, comes sobriety.

I prophesy that, thanks to Thursday's introduction of 24-hour licensing, there will be a phenomenal increase in drunkenness and after that, in a few years, we will witness a resulting influx into AA and related organisations. In other words, we will within a generation or two become a country populated by thousands of George Bushes, male and female. Think about it,Tony Blair. Is that really what you wanted to set in train this Thursday? I can only conclude that your love affair with the President of the United States goes deeper than any of us could ever have imagined.

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Comments

[Sean Gleeson]

Your prediction that thousands of Britons will become drunkards, then sober up, then become president of the United States, is subject to refutation. Even were the U.S. Constitution to be amended to allow Britons to hold the office of president, it is demonstrably impossible to expect thousands of living individuals to achieve that goal.

There is only one president at any given time, and he holds the office for an average of 5.02 years (43 presidents since 1789). Life expectancy in the U.K. is 78.2 years. Therefore, the number of expected U.S. presidents during the entire life span of a British baby born this very day is a mere 15.6! Even if we make liberal assumptions and double this figure to 31.2, and even if every one of those terms is given to an unbesotted Limey, it is a far cry from the thousands you prophesy.

Other than this niggling criticism, I commend your article.

[Alex Simmons]

How many of those tens of thousands of new pubs survived into the next decade?
Is it not possible that people turned to beer because the water was so dangerous?
How many pubs-per-head were there before and after the 1830 Act, and how does this compare with today?
Why did the lengthening of opening hours into the morning during the 1980s not result in a huge wave of morning-time drunkness?

You need to answer these questions satisfactorily to show that your position is correct. Otherwise, your entry here remains just one long logical fallacy.