How is alcohol affecting Britain? "City suburbs and country towns on a Saturday night are like the Wild West. Binge drinking, fuelled by happy hours and bargain offers, is putting lives in danger. Violent crime is up 14% in a year, largely because of alcohol," said the Sun.

In response to the epidemic of alcohol abuse, the government on Monday proposed a wide range of measures designed to reduce consumption, including stiffer penalties for drunkenness, promotion of sensible drinking and a voluntary ban on drinks aimed at under-18s.

The Daily Express counted the cost to the police, the NHS and the young of the booze culture and decided the government's plans were overdue. "We must educate our young, who often lack the family stability of, say, the French or Italians in the continental attitude to drink. They need to know that losing control and dignity is not something in which they can take pride. It's something of which to be deeply ashamed."

The flurry of initiatives was ironic, reckoned Libby Purves in the Times. "Boozers have been lurching around annoying people for hundreds of years, so we already have plenty of perfectly good laws: drunk and disorderly, insulting behaviour and breach of the peace." The police, therefore, should be dealing with the problem. So why weren't they? "Either they don't have enough officers or can't face the paperwork".

In the Daily Telegraph, Theodore Dalrymple laid some of the blame on the "relative cheapness" of alcohol and thought the government's proposal to raise the price of drink in the centre of towns and cities was "not absurd". For Dalrymple, mass public drunkenness "reveals the terrible emptiness of modern British life". Other nations drink more per capita, he said, but "they drink to enjoy, not to obliterate consciousness."

The Daily Mirror, too, felt the government's measures were tinkering without confronting the underlying reasons for boozing. "The whole culture of drinking in this country needs to be investigated, starting with the really big question: why are our young people virtually unique in the world for how they abuse alcohol? It is good that the government has woken up to the crisis, but far more radical measures are needed to deal with it."