Elegant England: Drunken Yobs Call For Help Every Seven Seconds on New Year's

Content warning on the pics in the article, which show yobs with bloodied foreheads and slack after an alcohol-induced purge.

The first picture is especially bloody, so have a caution.

Violence scarred celebrations and led to a bloody New Year across the country as emergency services endured a chaotic end to 2008.

Ambulance control centres reported receiving 999 calls as often as once every seven seconds - the second highest volume of calls since the Millennium - as binge drinkers turned nasty in the freezing temperatures.

Many of the calls related either to alcohol-fuelled assaults or excessive drunkenness.

Booze contributed to time-wasting calls to 999 operators too, with one man calling to ask if New York was in America, and what time it was there.
Elsewhere, while large numbers were ferried to hospitals, in some areas injuries were treated by paramedics in 'booze buses' to leave ambulances free for more serious emergencies.

In Essex, so many drunk people were arrested that all 200 of the constabulary's cells were filled, and overflow revellers had to be shipped to neighbouring Kent to be held for the night.

If I can make a quick point: Europe forever flatters itself by contrasting itself -- erudite, educated, prosperous, well-mannered, bourgeois -- with America -- drunken, stupid, fat, loud, obnoxious, and ill-informed.

They do this by the same trick every time: They compare their stable, well-behaved middle classes and working with our less well-behaved, less refined lower classes.

Of course this is stupid. It is comparing apples to oranges, or, more accurately, one population's most well-behaved cohort with another population's least well-behaved one.

Compare most of the American lower class-- which, despite not having much money, tends to be industrious and fairly law-abiding -- with the European lower class and the comparison changes quite a bit. The American lower class is far more ambitious and self-improving than the "No Future" drunken yobs of Europe.

If Europe sees more of our lower classes than they do of ours.... well, that's because our lower class is industrious enough, ambitious enough, culturally curious enough, and diligent enough to set aside money... to travel to England and the Continent.

Unlike the lower classes in Europe, whose idea of travel is hopping the ferry to start a drunken, blood-and-vomit-spraying riot in another nation's soccer stadium.

The difference, apparently, is that the American lower classes believe they can prosper if they work and save -- and they do so prosper -- unlike the lower classes of Europe, which know they have, as the Sex Pistols sang, No Future. So why not spend virtually every night getting slosh-drunk at the pub?

posted by Ace at 04:40 PM

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