LONDON (AFP) - Britain made merry-making with drunken excess grounds for a steep fine during the Christmas season, with the government attempting to rein in a worrying and widespread problem of binge-drinking.
Measures which take effect this weekend and run through January include raising the fines for disorderly behavior and allowing police officers to issue on-the-spot penalties for illegal alcohol sales to minors.
The effort to clean the streets for Christmas and New Year's follows a similar campaign last summer which led to more than 5,000 arrests, a drop in crime and a sting on bars and shops selling to boozing teenagers.
Fines for drunken, unruly behavior during the Christmas season have been raised from 50 pounds (97 dollars, 73 euros) to 80 pounds, and police officers will have free license to fine adults selling alcohol to minors or buying it for them.
The Home Office said it was also trying to extend the measures to allow police to force an immediate, 24-hour closure of premises caught selling alcohol to under-18s.
"The message is stark and simple: if you brawl in the street, urinate in a doorway or are sick in the curb, you could be slapped with an 80-pound fine," Richard Caborn, a junior minister in charge of alcohol licensing, said.
"Christmas is a time when people should be able to have a few drinks and enjoy themselves, but that should not be an excuse for violent and anti-social behaviour by a minority," added Hazel Blears, the junior Home Office minister who heads up policing.
For a sizeable proportion of Britons, binge-drinking is a weekend institution, with the young especially showing a greater taste for blind inebriation and its side effects than many of their European neighbors.
According to the Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS), 48 percent of British men and 31 percent of women aged 19 to 24 admit to having been blind drunk at least twice a month during the past year.
Similarly, 38 percent of Britons of both sexes first got drunk before the age of 13, compared to just 12 percent of the French. Within Western Europe, only hard-drinking Danish and Finnish teens outrank the British under-18s, with a tally of 40 percent.
A public health definition of binge-drinking is the consumption of at least five standard-sized alcoholic drinks on one occasion.
The holiday campaign, being rolled out in 180 communities, will also add mobile medical units in two Welsh cities on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, as well as this Friday, dubbed "Black Friday" by paramedics.
While the Labour-led government has put binge-drinking at the top of its domestic agenda, it has also had to balance its measures with the demands and influence of an enormous industry that includes 60,000 pubs.
In a sting operation carried out on 1,864 establishments as part of last summer's campaign, 45 percent of the bars and restaurants and 31 percent of the liquor stores were caught selling to minors.
But Blears said many bars were cooperating with the government initiative, ending all-you-can-drink deals and other promotions.
According to a December 2003 government, Britain lost 7.2 billion pounds due to binge-drinking-related crime, 1.2 billion pounds in terms of public health costs and 6.4 billion pounds was scraped off the economy due to some 17 million lost workdays.
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48 percent of British men and 31 percent of women aged 19 to 24 admit to having been blind drunk at least twice a month during the past year.
