There won’t always be an England

How did England so rapidly plummet from the world’s top dog to a nation that has no pride, no sense of its own history (except to be abjectly embarrassed by that history), and no sense of self-preservation. The latter appears in matters large, as in its inability to confront its increasingly visible Fifth Column, and small, as in the fact that the nation is drinking itself to death:

Drink-related hospital admissions in England have reached record levels, NHS statistics show.

Hospital admissions for alcoholic liver disease more than doubled in a decade, reaching 35,400 in 2004/5. Alcoholic liver disease deaths increased by 37%.

Admissions for alcoholic poisoning increased to 21,700 from 13,600 over the same 10-year period.

The Information Centre report also highlights England’s binge and underage drinking problem.

Nearly one in four secondary school children aged 11-15 reported that they had drunk alcohol in the past week when surveyed in 2005.

The average amount of alcohol consumed by this age group doubled between 1990 and 2000 and currently remains at 10.4 units (or about 10 small glasses of wine or five pints of beer) per week.

Young adults are the most likely to binge drink – a third of men and a quarter of women aged 16-24 said they had drunk more than double the recommended number of units on one day of the previous week, typically Saturday, when surveyed in 2004.

I should say that this absolutely debauched British approach to alcohol really isn’t that new.  England was also awash in alcohol at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries.  When, in the early 19th Century, the British turned to the high morality with associate with the Victorian era and, in increasing numbers, to Evangelical Christianity, these trends were partyly a response to the damage wrought by the Brits’ uncontrolled alcoholic excesses.  (America’s prohibition experiment was also a response to out-of-control drinking.)  I suspect that on this go-round, waiting in the wings for those British who can no longer take the damage the alcohol wreaks on their society, will be Islam, complete with its long-standing prohibition against alcohol.