Ten years ago, England relaxed its laws on the sale of alcohol. Pubs no longer had to call “last orders” at 11 p.m. — they could remain open all night.
Moralists feared the worst. The typical Englishman, after all, is altogether too fond of booze. As Shakespeare’s Iago puts it, “Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander … are nothing to your English … [H]e drinks you with facility your Dane dead drunk; he sweats not to overthrow your Almain. He gives your Hollander a vomit ere the next pottle can be filled.”
England accordingly braced itself for a societal breakdown. The Daily Mail warned against the “unbridled hedonism … with all the ghastly consequences that will follow.” The Sun prophesied a “swarm of drunken youngsters.” The police prepared for “an increase in the number of investigations of drink related crimes, such as rape, assault, homicide and domestic violence.” The Royal College of Physicians predicted that “24-hour pub opening will lead to more excess and binge drinking, especially among young people.”
Ten years on, we can see that each of these predictions was 180 degrees wrong.
When I was in my late teens, it was quite normal for young British men to spend Friday and Saturday nights drinking ’til they were comatose. By my early thirties, it was no longer just men. I remember feeling mildly annoyed that the phenomenon of public female inebriation had emerged at precisely the wrong moment for me: too late to enjoy as a teenage boy, just in time to hit me as a father of daughters.
As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. The lifting of restrictions was followed by a drastic drop in consumption. Binge drinking among 16 to 24-year-olds sank from 29 to 18 percent. Overall alcohol sales declined by 17 percent. Alcohol-related hospital admissions fell sharply, as did alcohol-fueled crimes. As Christopher Snowdon put it in a paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs, deregulation “made the country a better place to live by treating people as adults and allowing businesses to meet demand.”
Which is, if you think about it, the essential case for conservatism. Give people more responsibility and they will behave more responsibly. Not all of them; but enough to make freedom worthwhile.
Before 2005, we used to drink to beat the closing bell. We’d rush to down a final pint, and then spill crapulously onto the streets at precisely the same moment as everyone else. You could hardly have designed a system more likely to encourage two of our ugliest national characteristics: drunkenness and hooliganism.
The licensing laws didn’t just curtail our freedom; they created the phenomenon they were supposed to forestall.
We see again and again how laws have unintended consequences while abjectly failing in their intended consequence. For example, there is growing evidence that warning signs on roads make accidents more likely. We drive carefully when we see the signs; but the moment we reach a stretch of road with no warnings, we unconsciously relax. The signs give us a false sense that someone else is looking out for us. When they are removed from the entire length of a road, as has happened experimentally in parts of the Canadian Rockies, drivers are constantly watchful, and less likely to crash.
Extend the logic little further. In the aftermath of the banking crisis, pundits and politicians rushed to proclaim that banks had been too lightly regulated. I’ve been in politics long enough to recognize when a story has passed the point of correction but, if only for the record, it’s worth pointing out that financial services were, with the exception of nuclear power, the most regulated sector in the Western world.
The trouble was that, like the pub licensing laws, the banking regulations had unintended consequences. As the costs of compliance rose, banks were forced to consolidate, thus creating the wretched “too big to fail” phenomenon. Meanwhile, people were lulled into thinking (wrongly) that the regulators were looking out for them.
If you’ve bought a financial product, you’ll know what I mean: Into your email inbox plops a 200 page document that you’ll never read, but which gives you the vague impression that someone somewhere is on top of the risk. It makes you less wary.
How’s this for an idea: why not replicate the Canadian Rockies scheme? Why not make the directors of banks liable for their own losses, and then withdraw all sector-specific state regulation, leaving only the basic common law rules that govern tort and contract? Instead of trying to prevent future bank failures, why not aim for a system where banks can fail without it becoming a national disaster? Sure, there would still be bankruptcies, just as there are still fights outside pubs. But they would be less frequent and less critical.
Remember that quip of Franklin’s about those who give up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserving neither? Perhaps the restless old polymath was on to something.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
