Boris Johnson Covid lockdown parties highlight U.K. drinking culture

In Britain, women who have finished college are 21 percent more likely to binge drink monthly, while in the U.S. they are 17 percent less likely, according to an OECD report released in May. In the U.K., 30 percent of adults binge drink monthly compared to 26 percent in the U.S.“Historically leisure has always been built up around the alcohol sector and the pub trade among a large part of the population,” said Thomas Thurnell-Read, a lecturer in sociology at Loughborough University in England, who researches alcohol consumption.“There’s a history of workplace drinking around the rhythms of working life: celebrating the end of the working week on Friday afternoons, when payday comes around people celebrate that, pre-drinks around Christmas and leaving parties. A University of Sheffield report released in 2018 also showed a drop among that age bracket who reported drinking “nowadays,” declining from 90 percent to 78 percent.At the same time, as some young people are changing their habits, companies are increasingly aware that alcohol in and around the workplace may alienate some workers, according to Richard Piper, the head of Alcohol Change, a nonprofit that advocates to end harm from alcohol.“There is a big change happening whereby workplaces, and we are working with some of the biggest workplaces in the U.K., and they are all working out that if they talk about well-being that alcohol is part of that,” he said.