Every year, an enormous scandal miraculously erupts from nowhere. It doesn’t really matter to anyone involved whether the “threat” is from shadowy Internet paedophiles, murderous foreign immigrants, life-saving vaccinations – as long as ignorant masses are stirred up and headlines grabbed, it’s all going well. This year, the relevant topic appears to be one close to my heart: the drink.

From our floundering PM to the BBC via the police (and obviously the traditional right-wing authoritarian commentators), the consensus is that every night, our city centres are reduced to drunken approximations of Falluja. Honest God-fearing folk are scared to leave the house for fear of being looted, raped and pillaged by barbarian drunkard hordes. Civilised society is on the verge of collapse.

This view, obviously, is a steaming pile of horseshit.

Last night, I went out in Manchester city centre. I don’t normally go out in the city centre, because the going-out venues are either fairly pleasant but close at 11, or stay open till late but play terrible music too loudly, serve pissy American and English lager at extortionate prices, and have nowhere to sit down. Indeed, the places we went to last night conformed perfectly to this rule, so we went home bored at about 1:00.

The point? We were all sober or almost sober, and not exactly full of wild Bacchean abandon – but town featured no trouble, no perception of trouble, and the drunks we noticed staggering around were a danger only to themselves. To recap, this is the binge-drinking centre of one of England’s top going-out cities, at bingeing peak time.

Now, Manchester, London, Leeds and Bristol are pretty much the only places I regularly go out in England – and I guess it’s possible that they’re unusually calm venues by the standards of the rest of the country. In which case, I’ll be highly pissed off if the provincial crowd impose restrictions on us civilised types to deal with *their* problem.

However… I can’t help finding it somehow more likely that the whole binge drinking hysteria is a load of made-up nonsense, in traditional government/media/’expert’ crusade style.

The only solution from the citizenry is resistance to this crusade – so it’s clearly time to go to your local, order a drink of something agreeable (if your local serves nothing agreeable, then find a different local), and drink to the day when the absurd puritans fuck off and die.

Update: as Norm says, I should probably also point out that Manchester has a great many excellent drinking venues. However, these tend not to be in the city centre, which is a very Big Chain, mainstream, jugs-of-Carling-for-£8 kind of place.