©2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Society for the Study of Addiction

Addiction,

101

, 909–910

EDITORIAL

doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2006.01499.x

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKADD

Addiction

0965-2140© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Society for the Study of Addiction

2006

101

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Editorial

EditorialEditorial

EDITORIAL

Are you a closet Fabian? Licensing schemes then and now

The law which determines what the people have to pay for their drink, and when and where they can get drunk, is necessarily of interest to all; and as, in the future of things, such a law must be wholly satisfac-tory to few, it is certain to be the subject of many schemes for reform.

Edward Pease, 1899 [1]

Are you a closet Fabian? You could be if you find yourselfstaying up late at night, worrying about Britain’s newlicensing laws; or if you spend your days dreaming upnew ways to make the pubs less attractive to the youngand foolish (you would start by getting rid of those slotmachines); or if you cling to the Whiggish notion that themore you study a problem, the more likely you are tocome up with a solution.

The original Fabians did all these things. They werethe well-heeled but sensibly dressed socialists of late Vic-torian and Edwardian England, people such as GeorgeBernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and EdwardPease. They worried about the pubs, but before they saida word they did their homework. The Webbs wrote awhole

History of liquor licensing in England

[2]. Pease feltunable to comment on the subject without first summa-rizing what had been tried in other countries. (When itcame to America, he gave up. ‘The combinations, variet-ies, and modifications of the liquor laws in the Statesare . . . absolutely bewildering’, he confessed.)

As far as the Fabians were concerned, the only thing tobe learned from the British temperance movement waswhat not to do. Virginia Berridge, author of an intriguingreport commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Founda-tion, says otherwise [3]. Called

Temperance: its history andimpact on current and future alcohol policy

, the report wasreleased in November 2005, just in time to provide abackdrop to Britain’s new licensing laws.

Like the Fabians of yore, Berridge has done her home-work. She is scholarly and thorough, never missing a beatas she moves back and forth between the 19th centuryand our own. She has something else in common withthe Fabians: she believes that history has an importantrole to play in any discussion of contemporary policy. Itshows which policies work, albeit in settings very differ-ent from ours, and just as importantly, it shows

How towin

[4]. (This was actually the title of a book by FrancesWillard, president of the Woman’s Christian TemperanceUnion from 1879 to her death in 1898.)

The report makes several sensible recommendations,each presented in such a way that non-historians canmake sense of them and put them to use. But I was takenaback by one suggestion: involving religious leaders indiscussions of alcohol policy. It may be that British clericsare nicer than their American counterparts. It may bethat having an evangelical Christian in the White Houseis clouding my judgement; but I cannot help thinkingthat science and religion make poor bedfellows. In thewords of Billy Sunday, the baseball player turned revival-ist preacher, ‘When the Bible says one thing and scholar-ship says another, scholarship can go plumb to the devil.’I mention Billy Sunday because he was a big supporter ofProhibition—and because he is one of Jerry Falwell’sheroes [5].

For historians, the report’s more controversial side liesin the claim that the leaders of the British temperancemovement were more pragmatic and less doctrinairethan one might think. I wonder. To my mind, the mostsalient feature of the British temperance movement ishow little it was able to accomplish. Its nonconformistleaders had hoped for so much more. For the briefest ofmoments, in the 1850s, they flirted with bringing Amer-ican-style prohibition to Britain. Their model was the so-called Maine Law, the first state-wide ban on liquor. Thelaw was a disaster. The press, the London

Times

and

Punch

in particular, had a field day. In November 1851, justafter the Maine Law had taken effect,

Punch

printed theminutes from a fictional teetotallers’ society, noting thatthe members had met ‘to enjoy a little excitement derivedfrom hearing everybody abused, instead of from theabuse of fermented liquors’. Mr Belloway spoke, thenMessrs Screamer, Earsplit and Stunner [6]. In 1854, themagazine reminded its readers that ‘there are many kindsof intemperance, and not the least disgusting sort is thatwhich blurts forth upon others a stream of fierce and fierytrash’ [7]—and so on.

The failure of the Maine Law forced the British tem-perance movement to lower its sights and put its effortsinto drying up the country one community at a time. Thiswas the genesis of the so-called Permissive Bill, whichgave localities the option of going dry if a majority of rate-payers (two-thirds) so voted. Even this more modest ini-tiative was destined to fail each time it was introduced inParliament [8].

Missteps such as these led Brian Harrison to charac-terize the British temperance movement as a series of

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Editorial

©2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Society for the Study of Addiction

Addiction,

101

, 909–910

lessons not learned [9]. This was half right: the move-ment’s leaders may not have learned from their mistakesbut their opponents did, so much so that they succeededin confining temperance to the fringe of British politics.

Which brings me to the Fabians. I would suggest thatwe have more to learn from them than from the earnestand uncompromising nonconformists who led the Britishtemperance movement. Not all the lessons are equallygood. The Fabians wanted to municipalize the drinktrade, along with just about everything else—milk,bread, fire insurance, bathhouses and burials [10]. Theywere drawn irresistibly to all things Scandinavian, to theGothenburg system and its Norwegian equivalent, the

samlag

. They dreamt of building ‘people’s palaces’ wherethe working classes would be subjected to a non-stopround of wholesome activities and uplifting lectures, onscience, mechanical inventions, history, biography andtravel.

The original Fabians deserve a second look, not somuch for their ideas as for their assumptions. Unlike thetemperance crusaders, they were too conscientious toassume that alcohol was the problem and its removal thesolution, that ‘everyone would be well off but for thedrink’. While they generally viewed alcohol in negativeterms, they were realists. Unlike the temperance crusad-ers, who truly believed that there was a

solution

to thealcohol problem, the Fabians thought it could only beameliorated. The local veto, the darling of the British tem-perance movement, they dismissed as ‘workable perhapsin the Australian bush, but quite unsuited to Lancashireand London’ [11]. Theirs was a world of imperfect fixes,each grounded in impartial enquiry. Pease expressed itbetter than anyone else. Looking back at everything thathad been attempted so far (he was writing in 1899, justas the Royal Commission on the Licensing Laws was con-cluding its own enquiries), he concluded that ‘heroicremedies, hasty repression by high license and partialprohibition, have created evils worse than thoseattempted to be cured, whilst moderate reforms havebeen markedly successful’.

The new licensing law has many old-timers in theLabour Party worried. They say it is yet another sign ofhow far the party has wandered far from its Fabian roots.This is true, if one focuses only on the Fabians’ dreams ofsanitizing the pubs and making them loom less large inthe lives of the working poor. But it forgets that the Fabi-ans, unlike the temperance reformers who came beforethem, were always open to new ideas. My guess is thatEdward Pease would have been quite appalled by the newlicensing laws—and by New Labour in general. But hewould have found something to like in the concept of‘grown-up liberalism’.

JESSICA WARNER

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, 33 Russell Street,Toronto, Ontario M5S 2S1, Canada.

E-mail: jessica_warner@camh.net

References

1. Pease E. R.

Liquor licensing at home and abroad

. London: TheFabian Society; 1899.

2. Webb S., Webb B.

The history of liquor licensing in Englandprincipally from 1700 to 1830.

London: Longmans, Green;1903.

3. Berridge V.

Temperance: its history and impact on current andfuture alcohol policy.

York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation;2005.

4. Willard F. E.

How to win

. New York: Funk & Wagnalls; 1887.5. Sunday B.

Sundayisms

. New York: Chelsea House Publish-ers; 1970.

6. Anonymous. Total abstinence and moderation. Punch1851, p. 92–3.

7. Anonymous. Temperance out of temper. Punch 1854, p.199.

8. Dingle A. E.

The campaign for prohibition in Victorian England:the United Kingdom alliance, 1872–1895

. London: Croom-Helm; 1980.

9. Harrison B.

Drink and the Victorians: the temperance questionin England 1815–1872

. London: Faber and Faber; 1971.10. McBriar A. M.

Fabian socialism and English politics 1884–1918

. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1962.11. Anonymous.

Municipal drink traffic: with a criticism of localveto and other reform projects

. London: The Fabian Society;1899.