Britons prepare for a Christmas of hangovers

One in 20 Britons is an alcoholic — twice as many as are hooked on drugs — and 40 per cent of violent crimes are fuelled by drink, two new surveys show.

“People think that in order to enjoy life you have to have a drink…but alcohol is a drug and it must be treated with respect,” Derek Rutherford, co-director of the Institute of Alcohol Studies told Reuters.

Overdosing on alcohol is not new to Britain.

“Our habits of drinking made the English famous among all nations,” John of Salisbury said in the 12th century.

The problem is that Britons cannot take their drink.

An average Frenchman gets through 11.10 litres of purealcohol a year, while his British counterpart manages only seven, anti-alcohol abuse group Eurocare’s 1996 figures show.

But Rutherford, who is also honorary secretary of Eurocare,said it is how we drink, not how much.

“We have a pattern of binge drinking,” he said.

Professor Griffith Edwards, author of Alcohol: The Ambiguous Molecule

, agreed.

“It’s not fashionable to get intoxicated in France — and the same goes for Spain and Italy. But there’s a tradition in Britain to go out with the intention of getting drunk,” he said.

The end result can be much uglier.

Alcohol bingeing has turned town centres across Britain into no-go areas on weekend nights, as gangs of beer-fuelled youths spill out of pubs, munch through a kebab then look for a fight.

“Most young people expect a hangover on a Sunday morning,” Professor Edwards said.

The `drunken yob’ factor — best exemplified by the tanked-up English soccer fans who ran riot at this year’s Euro 2000 soccer tournament — has become the norm.

A Mori survey in September showed more than a quarter ofBritons had been the victims of alcohol-fuelled crime.

“There is a lot of violence in towns and cities at weekends. People out for a quiet evening’s entertainment come across hordes of youths who have drunk X number of pints, said a spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers.

Getting drunk has typically been a male thing, but British women are catching up, according to surveys published in November.

Alcohol Concern said 50 percent more women were now bingeingon alcohol than 10 years ago.

Some 40 per cent said they had had sex with a stranger after drinking too much, a survey by women’s magazine Company found.

Police and some politicians think the best way to stamp out binge drinking and the ensuing `Friday night scrap’ is to adopt European style opening hours.

The government moved in April to shake-up Britain’s archaic licensing laws, with proposals that could allow pubs and bars to stay open past the current 11 pm closing time.

“Longer drinking hours could avoid the trend for binge drinking before 11 pm,” a spokesman for the Home Office (interior ministry) said.

The alcohol industry — serving a market worth some 33 million pounds ($47 million) a day according to the Institute of Alcohol Studies — has been lobbying for change.

But anti-alcohol abuse campaigners say trying to imitate the Europeans will just make things worse.

“Those with a vested interest in selling alcohol say if closing time were abolished, the English would become like the French and the Italians…and peace would reign on the streets," an Institute of Alcohol Studies report said.

It is a “highly simplistic solution to a complex problem,” it added.