Britons drink so much that we now have children admitted to hospital with liver disease. According to a survey by the Office for National Statistics, more 13-year-olds have drunk alcohol than not – that’s 350,000 13-year-old drinkers in England and Wales alone; I don’t expect the figures for Scotland especially buck the trend.

The week before last a 25% rise in crime over three years by girls aged between 10 and 17 was blamed on ladette culture and underage drinking (I don’t know why they bother to differentiate: ladette culture is underage drinking).

“The relentless rise in [hospital] admissions involving more and more young people is very bad news,” said Professor Roger Williams, a liver specialist at University College London, who added that he and his colleagues were treating people in their twenties and thirties for liver failure and cirrhosis.

The proposed solution – shops and supermarkets facing legal curbs on the sale of cut-price alcohol – has its heart in the right place, but I don’t see how it would really address what has become a problem of epidemic proportions. If people whose definition of enjoyment is drinking can no longer buy cheap booze, they start concocting their own and end up drinking meths – or whatever its modern equivalents might be.

Keen as I am for young people to realise that drinking till you puke, pass out and wake up to find you’ve wet the bed isn’t the most fun you can have, I don’t think pushing them towards dodgy contraband alcohol or toxic homemade hooch is going to do much for their health either.

What we surely need to address is why vast swathes of young people - and their parents and grandparents, too, I expect – find being so intoxicated that you can’t stand up the very acme of fun. We’ve all done it: I had my stomach pumped once when I was a student (I know – classy), but most of us aren’t madly keen to keep on doing it.

I fully understand the joys of the three-hour lunch: I love sitting in the sunshine with a chilled bottle of white wine; I have no reformed drinker-style notions about the evils of booze. Drinking until you’re giggly and feel like singing is very nice. Drinking until the room starts spinning and you want to throw up isn’t. What I can’t get my head around is why such vast numbers of people believe it is and that it is what you must do to have a laugh.

I was walking back from St Leonards in East Sussex to Hastings a few months ago, at about three in the morning, after a party. We detoured via a chip shop near the sea front because we were starving.

Here is what we saw at the chip shop: 1) a young man, who had been glassed in the face, trying to buy a kebab; 2) two extremely drunk young men standing outside (near some sick) trying to start a fight with, as far as I could tell, any random person; 3) two girls aged about 15, completely inappropriately dressed (because, sorry, and do exercise your female rights to cram your pallid flesh into whatever porno costume you like, but if you’re going to stagger about pissed at three in the morning, take a coat and wear it) clutching each other and barely able to stand up; and 4) another young girl, outside the chip shop this time, being felt up by some bloke as she was vomiting.

The thing is, having been at a party until 3am, my companions and I were also drunk. But, Jesus, not that drunk. Why would you do that to yourself? In what way is it fun to be glassed, semi-raped or puke down your dress? Does anyone seriously wake up in the morning and think: “Top night”? Statistics tell us they must, in vast and increasing numbers.

I happened to be in Hastings, but I expect a version of the hideous scenario above plays itself out everywhere. I know young people in the countryside are so bored there’s nothing for it but to drink, have sex (but apparently not understand how contraception works. Why not? – it’s not exactly challenging) and take drugs, and I suspect that the more remote the community, the more intense the boredom and the more extreme the partaking: there is actually something intensely provincial about drinking to excess.

It has nevertheless become shorthand for being “one of us”, recognisably a member of the great tribe of pissheads, up for a laugh. The liberal elite, in their usual moronic, tragically out of touch way, thought that endlessly printing photographs of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford in full Bullingdon rig and banging on about toffs would freak out voters and send them scurrying gratefully into the arms of the Socialist Workers party.

As we know from the past few weeks – this one included – it didn’t quite work that way. Well, d’oh. Okay, so they’re wearing funny clothes – but they’re also doing what the nation likes doing best: getting bladdered. The whole raison d’être of clubs such as the Bullingdon is drinking to the point of oblivion. It is also the whole raison d’être of vast swathes of the country.

It has become as outré in some circles to use the word “underclass” as it would be to call homosexuals “arse bandits” or black people “nig-nogs”. We keep telling ourselves that the lovely, admirable, hard-working, morally upright (there was a time when it was the nation’s conscience as well as its backbone) working class still exists and a few horrid bad apples are spoiling the barrel.

This is simply not true. The old working class exists, but it is on its last legs, and the underclass that has replaced it is on the rise – angry, desperate, broke and broken, culturally and morally barren, passing on their poor, empty lives to their children and grandchildren. No wonder they drink to oblivion – wouldn’t you?

The fact of the matter is that the binge-drinking problem is largely an underclass problem. Teen pregnancies are largely an underclass problem. Teenage crime is largely an underclass problem. Child neglect – we live in a country where a little girl allegedly starved to death in her own home last week – is largely an underclass problem. Our collective problems are largely underclass problems.

Could somebody not just come out and say it, before another generation floats away to its doom on a sea of alcopops? The underclass was made, not born. Nobody asks to live in poverty, with no hope, no ambitions, no possibility of betterment, and the belief that the most fun you can have is to drink yourself into early cirrhosis. I know they’re hard to love, but really – do we owe these people no responsibility whatsoever? Don’t cut the price of their dreadful gut-rot: help them.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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