Chris Maclean: The drink is no demon

I've just been mugged by my local secondary school.

I'd been invited, at the last minute, to help on a panel discussing the issue of alcohol for their "Citizenship" course.

On checking in I should have been alerted when the receptionist responded with "yeah, the binge drinking course".

Ushered to a side room I found myself in the company of two guys from a homeless charity, a policeman "responsible for young people in Kent" (big responsibility there, I thought. I could do with his home number), a local councillor, a doctor in A&E and a nice chap called Simon from Alcoholics Anonymous. It was easy to see who the villain was going to be here. Me.

Questions were posed from an assembly of about 150 fifteen year olds. To be fair they were all very good.

But two very clear things emerged. Firstly fewer young people, younger than 16, seem to get into pubs nowadays in contrast to what I experienced as a teenager. Secondly the issue of the "problem" seems contrived, artificial and largely untrue.

My earliest memory of drinking in a pub was at thirteen. I was at a shabby boarding school and, because I was one of the biggest kids, the teachers used to delight in taking us to the pub. When I ask those of my age group (I'm 51) I discover my experience is not unique. Most of them drank at fourteen and fifteen.

But talking to many youngsters nowadays I discover they don't get into pubs until much later. I think that is rather sad. Challenge 21 and other initiatives have put a damper on that. So, despite politician's talk of de-mystifying drink with the new licensing laws, we discover that the significance of drinking at eighteen has never been so heightened.

My solution to this, I suggested, was that kids of sixteen should be allowed to drink beer (below four per cent) but no spirits until twenty-one. I got a mixed response.

But the issue of "binge drinking" also seemed to be largely inappropriate. Forgive me for seeming to deny the obvious but really there is little new here.

Drink consumption, per person. In the UK is still continuing to decline dramatically. Pubs are disappearing and it is getting tougher. And even the goodly doctor on the panel couldn't claim there were more incidents in A&E than before - only that they were more spread out as a consequence of the Licensing Act.

Our national history is fundamentally underpinned by drink. Our glorious Navy which ruled the seas for centuries and provided much of our Empire, established many fine towns and cities was, according to some sources, mostly manned by those "recruited" whilst drunk. Many of the social improvements, improvements that chararacterise our finest moments, occured in the nineteenth century and were in direct response to issues of alcohol.

I had the head of a history department in a local school here last night explaining that our finest politician, the man who led us through our darkest hour of WWII, was permanently inebriated.

Only twenty years ago a fine lunch was considered an institution by many and Fleet Street was a by-word for drunkeness. It wasn't, and isn't all bad.

There is nothing new here. Maybe the language in A&E at midnight on a Saturday might be a little richer. But there are plenty of other things that can be blamed for that.

I left the school feeling things with young people really aren't as gloomy as many suggest. Life with a pint of beer is really a whole lot better.

And who knows, if some of the panel had a pint things might be a lot happier.