Hogarth’s satire is as appropriate now as it was 250 years ago, says Dan Jones. What we need is a new approach to our age-old drinking problem
In 1751, as the great Gin Craze was winding down, William Hogarth produced a series of six prints. It included ‘Gin Lane’, his cruel masterpiece. In the foreground a syphilitic old slapper lolls across a dirty flight of steps, pinching from the snuffbox as her baby tumbles to its death in the cellar of a gin shop. Behind her kale-eyed rioters tear themselves and their surroundings to pieces. Brawlers wield furniture as weapons. As Hogarth later wrote, ‘In Gin Lane... nothing but idleness, poverty, misery and ruin are to be seen; distress even to madness and death, and not a house in tolerable condition but Pawnbrokers and the Gin shop.’
Sound familiar? It should, because there’s still a Gin Lane in every town and city centre you care to look at. This week the Sun has launched an investigation into Britain’s binge-drinking girls, with a series of horrifying snaps from around the UK: a girl dancing with her knickers round her ankles in Cardiff, another vomiting in front of a ‘drink awareness’ poster in Manchester. One of the clearest symptoms of what David Cameron has labelled ‘Broken Britain’ is the collapse between the concepts of sociable drinking and public drunkenness. Our modern Gin Lane — let’s call it Puke Alley — has been caricatured to the point of parody: hair gel and vomit, fighters and fat slags, alcopops and police-wagons, pairs of mugs doing bad coke in nightclub toilets and the bouncers issuing licks out back by the bins.
But just because it has been parodied doesn’t mean it ain’t so. The drinks have changed a bit. The squalor remains. Now, on Puke Street, they drink alcopops and two-for-one shots, topping up on the early evening’s super-strength cider and cheap spirits sold as loss-leaders in supermarkets. And spread-legged, dead-eyed birds still slump on steps — now as then still instinctively more shocking than blokes doing the same thing. (Sexist? Yes, but true.)
In other words, Hogarth’s vision of 18th-century ‘Broken Britain’ differs barely at all from our own. But if Gin Lane is where we are, its hopeful counterpart Beer Street is where we want to be. In Beer Street, Hogarth set out an example of a society where people drank moderately and responsibly. He wrote: ‘[In] Beer Street all is joyous and thriving. Industry and jollity go hand in hand; the Pawnbroker in this happy place is the only house going to ruin...’ Beer Street was a place where drinking was a social lubricant, the relaxing pastime of the busy citizen.
Where is Beer Street today? Out of sight and pleasantly out of its mind. Hidden away in gastro-pubs and at middle-class dinner parties, where everyone may be trashed, but somehow manage not to spray the streets with semi-digested oven chips and black sambuca. Here are the responsible citizens: those whose natural response to guzzling several litres of booze and shoving a load of drugs up their bum is nothing more antisocial than talking bollocks until 4 a.m. and then going home to relieve the babysitter.
The Tories, very conscious of the need to turn the corner from Gin Lane to Beer Street — or from Puke Alley to Holland Park Road, if you like — have hinted pretty firmly at what they would do to tackle all this. At party conference in October, Chris Grayling and George Osborne both implied that policy starts with the assumption that problem drinkers tend to favour problem drinks. They have proposed hefty tax hikes on super-strength lager and cider, while leaving the humble pint in the pub alone. That means roughly a quid and a half on top of a four-pack of Special Brew or a bumper bottle of WKD, and a ban on supermarkets selling spirits below cost price. Pint in the pub? Nice bottle of red? Carry on as you were. The message isn’t ‘don’t drink too much’. It’s more ‘don’t drink this, drink that’.
This fiscal weaning process is based on studies that have suggested a direct link between tax rises and alcohol consumption, and which show that while spirits are fairly responsive to tax rises, beer is far less so. In other words, you can in theory nudge people from the worst drinks to the least-worst. And — rightly — it will be accompanied by tougher restrictions on licensing and harsher penalties for those premises that break the terms of their licence, by serving minors or inebriates, or allowing a public nuisance. The Tories also intend to make it harder and more expensive to get a licence from your local council in the first place.
That’s not exactly revolutionary thinking. In fact, this was broadly the nature of the various Gin Acts passed between 1736 and 1751. Gin — being ten times stronger than ale and originally used for medicinal purposes — was seen to encourage far worse behaviour because of its singular purpose. The government then placed heavy financial restrictions on licencing and tried to make the drink too expensive to imbibe. Likewise today, as hobo cider, alcopops and rough-as-glasspaper vodka are brought to market with no other purpose but to facilitate extreme intoxication in the shortest possible time, there is a good case for placing them out of reach of those who can’t handle them, and punishing the vendors who sell irresponsibly. In a sense, what the Conservatives propose is a solution as old as the problem.
What remains to be seen is whether a fiscal nudge here and a legislative clampdown there can ever be enough to bring public drunkenness under control. The gin experience is not overwhelmingly promising. After the massive price hikes under the first Gin Act of 1736, there was not a mass move away from gin to beer, but a good seven years of even harder drinking than before. Cheap, illegally distilled booze prevailed and gin riots dragged British towns even deeper into a national alcoholic dementia. Even following the more moderate and effective 1751 Act, there are plenty of people who would argue that the end of the gin craze had less to do with the Gin Laws, and more to do with rising grain prices, falling wages and the introduction of tea to the working classes.
And after all that, during the supposedly improved Victorian society of the 1840s, a young Friedrich Engels could still report that ‘30,000 workers are drunk in Glasgow every Saturday night... It is particularly on Saturday evenings that such intoxication can be seen in all its bestiality, for it is then that the workers have just received their wages and go out for enjoyment at rather earlier hours than on other days of the week... on such an evening in Manchester I have seldom gone home without seeing many drunkards staggering in the road or lying helpless in the gutter... It is easy to see the consequences of widespread drunkenness — the deterioration in personal circumstances, the catastrophic decline in health and morals, the breaking up of homes.’
This is precisely the situation that David Cameron must resolve. If he does so, he will be remembered as the moral PM he aspires to be. For this reason we must hope that his party’s Gin Act works. The other option — and it must be his last resort — is expensive, illiberal and tedious NYC-style zero-tolerance policing in which the ordinary drinker is punished alongside the fat slag spilling over on the nightclub steps. This works, but it requires massive, blunt state intervention and the constant interference of petty officials in public life — which is the kind of thing that makes all right-thinking people queasy.