Oh, To Be a Lush in England!

Mark Steyn gave all of us a heads up a few days ago to a new public safety scheme in Great Britain. The police will distribute gaily colored flip flops to drunk women as they exit pubs and attempt to wend their boozy way home. Without high heels to trip them up, the poor girls will avoid twisting their ankles. Or, horror of horrors, have to walk home barefoot with the fashionable footware dangling from one nail varnished paw!

Now Milo has sent me news of yet another police program to keep the streets safe. This time they are passing out free pens to drunk people in Manchester. Pens that double as bubble blowers.

The idea is that violence, assaults, property damage, and excessive late night noise will be abated if the drunk people are distracted by these little toys on the stagger back to the ol’ homestead. They used to pass out free lollipops, but that wasn’t doing the trick. It was decided that the big guns in the form of bubble blowing pens was necessary.

My admittedly limited background in law enforcement leads me to think that arresting drunk hell raisers and tossing them in a cell for 12 hours or so is the best way to reduce all that violence, noise, and torn up private property. There must be something about the conditions in England that makes this a losing strategy, like maybe their drunks are so dangerous that they have to be placated by toys and free giveaways so they don’t tear up the town like Godzilla. Lollipops, bubbles, and flip-flops are the way to go over there when dealing with these pub-crawling menaces!

I had no idea that the police in Britain were overwhelmed by hordes of drunk people, swarming the streets every night at closing time. It must resemble some sort of zombie movie every evening.

It would also seem that their medical facilities are swamped by miniskirt-clad doxies, demanding treatment for twisted ankles and stubbed toes. I would discuss how this was predictable considering how England has socialized medicine, but then I realized that would steal some thunder from our readers.