AMONG the less appealing aspects of British life adopted by Jersey from that half of its dual heritage is the culture of binge-drinking. For too long, Islanders have suffered the mess, noise, destruction and threatening atmosphere generated when groups of people get together for the express purpose of drinking too much and behaving badly.

There will, therefore, have been a warm welcome for the comments on the subject by the new Home Affairs Minister reported earlier this week. With his remark that ‘this is a very big issue for me’, Senator Ian Le Marquand was speaking on behalf of the majority of the population, who will have been delighted with his promise to include a crackdown on binge-drinking, notably by the young, among his early priorities.

It remains a mystery why the development of binge-drinking has been tolerated as part of the culture in a small, self-governing place like this, which could have stamped on it at a much earlier stage. The likely explanation lies yet again in Jersey’s bewildering tendency to blindly follow UK examples and policies, instead of drawing on a wider range of influences from which to tailor its own independent response to changes in society.

Despite defeatist claims to the contrary, the simple fact is that Jersey does not have to put up with this behaviour, the grim results of which became all too familiar to Senator Le Marquand in his years as Magistrate. It is not harmless fun, but a mixture of anti-social selfishness and criminality which can be both discouraged and penalised much more strenuously than is currently the case.

We hope that the examination of a range of new measures initiated by Senator Le Marquand – including making it an offence for unaccompanied teenagers to drink alcohol in public and reversing the burden of proof in cases where licensees serve people who are already drunk – will receive concerted support from politicians, youth and social workers and police forces, both States and honorary.

The problem should not be identified as primarily one which concerns teenagers, though. The issue is really to do with the Island’s quality of life in general and the question of how safe and pleasant our streets should be, a question with obvious commercial implications as well as social ones. If binge-drinking and the behaviour it causes cease to be tolerated at all, the problem among the young is likely to reduce rapidly to a more predictable and manageable scale.

It is, of course, true that no amount of policy-making will stop teenagers experimenting with the legally available drug alcohol in a traditional rite of passage towards adulthood. There is, however, a great deal that can and should be done to prevent those first brief encounters being able to progress seamlessly to a way of life.