No one blinked an eye at newspaper pictures of semi-clad young women in the gutter this week — women who were bragging they’d ‘got wasted’ on £1 in Warrington.
We have become inured to the sight of girls with their breasts tumbling out, their skirts so short they leave nothing to the imagination, and so drunk they can’t stand. In this case, they’d been taking advantage of a ‘Two-Bob Tuesday’ event at a pub, where shots of vodka could be bought for 10p. Even the scenes of them being pawed by strangers in the street seemed par for the course.
Yet when you actually encounter this kind of behaviour, it is horribly shocking. Last Saturday night, I was in Liverpool — the 2008 European Capital of Culture — for the Labour Party conference. In the shadows of the Liver Building, I saw a group of expensively — but barely — dressed young women standing in a circle on the city’s famous promenade.