Jayne Dowle: It's not just drinkers with an alcohol problem

The aim, that it would promote Continental-style "caf culture" in Britain, was at best misguided and, at worst, downright dangerous. The idea that we would be sitting out 'til the small hours, sipping nice glasses of wine and gently putting the world to rights, was soon

replaced by the Anglo-Saxon reality. Loads of people smashed out of their heads on super-cheap alco-pops, violence, and vomit in the municipal flowerbeds.

There is no doubt that Britain has got a problem with drink. We have even coined a new lexicon for it.

The effects of "binge-drinking" cost the NHS millions of pounds, and when you take into account liver disease, addiction and drink-fuelled attacks, countless lives every year.

But banning 24-hour drinking is missing the point.

As any beleaguered publican will tell you, serious drinkers don't go to the pub to get drunk any more. That is one of the reasons why pubs are closing every week. They stock up on cheap drink from the supermarket, off-licence or petrol station and get tanked up at home. Sometime around midnight, feeling nicely out-of-control, they will then get a taxi to whichever club is on the agenda. And when they get there, having already had a skinful, they won't drink very much at all.

So if you ban 24-hour drinking, you won't actually stop people drinking. You will just close down the places they might go when

they are drunk. And the logical conclusion of this? An explosion in suburban house-parties and illegal drinking dens which would bring back the spirit of Prohibition to Pontefract. Drive drinking underground and beneath the law, and you can't police it effectively at all.

Potentially, it could end up like the drugs trade, only worse, because drinking is far more socially-acceptable than shooting up heroin.

Of course, you could then try banning retailers from selling cheap alcohol. But how you do this in such a huge and commercially-driven market is beyond my reasoning? And also, drinkers will always find a drink. If one shop ups its prices, they will seek out another that is managing to sell it cheaper. Or a bloke down the road with a garage full of knock-off lager.

I said this when the Labour administration was making noises about banning 24-hour drinking a year or so ago, and I'll say it again. There is no point sitting in cosy Westminster dreaming up ways to sort it out. Coming up with bans and new legislation will only put a sticking plaster on an open wound.

There are two things ministers need to get their heads around; exactly why do so many people drink to such excess these days, and what has happened to British society to allow this problem to become so out of control?

Even – in fact you might argue, especially – the most-privileged members of our society like a party. But there is a difference between drinking for fun and drinking

because you haven't got anything else to do.

Like any drug, individuals use alcohol to escape from reality. If your reality is no job, no hope of a job, no house of your own and no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future, you are going to feel pretty rubbish about your life.

Especially if all your mates are in the same boat. So you will use alcohol to blot out the reality. Whether it's three-for-ones on a Saturday night or a can of extra-strong lager at the school gate, it is all about escape. Now, we can't expect any government, even one with the lofty ambitions of this new coalition, to wave a magic wand over all this overnight and create an instant utopia. But if they want to tackle the "problem" of drinking, they have to tackle the social problems that encourage people drink to excess in the first place. It's a big one that, isn't it?

Indeed, I haven't heard David Cameron say much about "Broken Britain" recently. But if he's looking for inspiration, he

might pop into a village pub or a working men's club one night. It will be pretty empty. Times have certainly changed from when these establishments were the hub of every community.

Years ago, when people like you and me experimented with our first halves of cider, we did it under close supervision. There was always an uncle, or a cousin, or a friend of your dad's propping up the bar.

They might have bought you a drink, but they would keep an eye

on you, make sure that you knew your place in the drinking order,

and tell you when you had enough. Or tell your mother. We learned to handle our drink. Now the Government has to learn how to handle its drink problem.