First let me declare an interest: I drink almost every day of my life. In fact, I can hardly remember the last day when I didn’t have a drink. It is almost as certain that I shall drink this evening as that the sun will rise tomorrow.

According to the slightly purse-lipped organisation, Alcohol Concern, this makes me one of the three million British problem drinkers who can’t get through the day without a drink. Well, I could, of course – I just don’t want to. Honestly.

It is clear to any unbiased observer, however, that we in Britain do have a drink problem: many of us don’t know how to do it in a civilised fashion. That is why the House of Lords debated yesterday a measure to permit unaccompanied minors into public houses: if only we could adopt the relaxed, family-friendly French and Italian attitudes to alcohol, perhaps we should not witness the nightly brutish scenes of drunken debauchery and violence that grace our city and town centres. The undergraduates of St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, — briefly banned from imbibing at social events due to a series of “deplorable incidents” — would cease to vomit all over their dreaming spire, to the relief of the Fellows and, no doubt, the porters.

Some say it was ever thus. Not only do students always exhibit high spirits, but Britain is the land of Gin Lane. There is nothing new under the sun: certainly not British mass public drunkenness.

Nonsense. Thanks to what mechanism of genetic atavism is it more relevant to compare the Britons of today with those of 250 years ago than with those of 50 years ago, when mass public drunkenness did not exist (though, of course, there were always drunks)? As for high-spirited students, what was acceptable as the occasional folly of a few is not acceptable as the perpetual vocation of the multitude.

Our mass public drunkenness is a new phenomenon, and not a pleasant one to behold. It has two sources: the relative cheapness of alcohol and the ideological rejection of self-control.

For decades now, the idea of self-control (and the related self-respect and respect for others) has come under withering attack from intellectuals, who have argued that any form of repression of inclinations is not only ridiculous and oppressive, but psychologically and physically damaging as well. If you don’t express your anger, you’ll get cancer; if you don’t publicly mourn a loved one, you’ll get depression. Self-expression — of which drunkenness is a rather easily achieved example — is the measure of all things.

This attitude, once confined to intellectuals, now permeates the whole of society. In a democratic, not to say demotic, age, what is good enough for the bohemians is good enough for the plebs. The necessity for self-expression reached its apogee when a murderer said to me: “I had to kill her, doctor, or I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

So the people who get drunk in public are not having a good time: they are undergoing therapy. If they didn’t vomit in the street, stagger into the road, scream obscenities at passers-by, have fights with broken bottles, they might do — or even more seriously, suffer — something worse.

But they are performing their duty as well, and exhibiting their virtue. Our former culture, with its inhibitions and restraints, is now universally agreed to have been oppressive. Therefore, the worse one behaves oneself, the more virtuous one is.

Mass public drunkenness is thus one of the first fruits of the attack on the forces of conservatism. We don’t need to instil the values of café society in children abandoned by the parents in pubs: we need to recover our self-control, and enforce the never-repealed laws against public drunkenness.

Cheers!

The author is a prison doctor.