Introduction

Abstract

This is a study of the high politics of social policy-making. This book looks at how elite politicians and decision-makers reacted to and wrestled with one particular social issue, ‘Drink’, in Britain over a long historical period. The Drink issue does not loom very large in general, secondary histories of the period, in contrast to other social policy areas such as housing, poverty, or education. Nevertheless, between 1830 and 1970 Drink attracted considerable excitement and interest in a variety of quarters. The Victorian temperance movement, at first the object of suspicion, came to be seen by most elites as a remarkable and commendable expression of grass roots popular enlightenment. Both J. S. Mill and T. H. Green used Drink legislation as key examples in their attempts to define the role of the state in a liberal polity. A royal commission in the 1890s spoke of a ‘gigantic evil’, and in 1901 ‘temperance reform’ was seen to merit a whole chapter to itself in C. F. G. Masterman’s influential volume of essays on social reform.¹ Demonstrations on either side in favour of or against the liquor licensing bills of 1904 and 1908 were enormous, on a scale comparable to those of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or the Countryside Alliance three generations later. The First World War saw widespread hysteria on the impact of drinking on national efficiency, along with serious moves to take the whole alcohol industry under state control. After 1945, both drink and driving and the health implications of alcohol consumption attracted interest and controversy among pressure groups and officials within Whitehall and, in the former case, considerable popular interest.