PaolaTotaro London
November 29, 2008
WHEN London's most famous blond, Boris Johnson, was battling Labour for the mayoral ermine earlier this year, one of his most popular — and clinching — pledges was to ban booze on the Tube.
The notion that it remained legal to crack open a coldie on the train home at night — or on the way to work in the morning, for that matter — seemed bizarre, an oversight from the days when drink-driving wasn't a crime and a fag in public wasn't an act of social rebellion.
Six months later, that pre-election promise has taken on a chilling significance: Britain is in the grip of a social crisis, an epidemic of binge-drinking and booze-fuelled violence that the Brits seem only now to have truly recognised.
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