Introduction

Chapter Five traced the lessening in efforts to morally regulate the use of alcohol in the inter-war period before identifying the beginnings of a recovery in the 1960s. What was the fate of this renewed moral regulation project? Simple keyword searches reveal that the number of references to ‘alcohol or ‘drink/drinking/drinker(s)’ in The Times and The Guardian rose more or less exponentially between 1965 and 2000. There was also a flurry of legislative activity affecting alcohol around the turn of the millennium. Both of these points imply that public anxiety about drinking was returning to almost Victorian heights. So, how can historical developments in the ways in which we understand and regulate alcohol consumption help make sense of increased public unease about drinking in the late 20th and early 21st centuries? Interestingly, this period of intensifying concerns coincided with further declines in organised temperance. Although revived somewhat in the 1960s, temperance groups had ceased to have any visible presence within public discourse on alcohol by the turn of the 21st century. So, had any remnants of temperance sentiments survived within public attitudes to alcohol? And what of the regulatory processes identified within the 1960s? Did liberalisation, targeted restrictions and resurgent moralising discourse continue to shape the way alcohol was governed?

This chapter examines public attitudes and alcohol regulation in the late 20th and early 21st centuries with a specific focus on the topics of crime and disorder. Particular attention is paid to the late 1980s and 2003–10 as these were periods in which major reforms to alcohol laws were made. Events since 2010 will be considered in Chapter Seven, which, with a concentration on the issues of addiction and public health, covers a roughly parallel timeframe.

The narrative of deregulation

Crime and disorder became major public issues in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In the 1970s, Hall et al politicised the concept of a ‘moral panic’ by arguing that the public reaction to ‘mugging’ had been manipulated by dominant social groups in response to, and in order to divert attention away from, structural social and economic problems.