Britain's youth is on a bender with binge drinking becoming the norm

It was just after 4am, the last clubs were closing and the police had three young men pinned against a brick wall and a fourth on the ground.

The young men, gloriously incoherent, some of them bleeding, could barely stand, let alone respond to the questions of the officers, who were responding to a fight. As the scene in Northampton unfolded, another drunken young man bashed a passer-by, then fled.

A young woman, Becky, tried to attend to her boyfriend, whose arm was numb and collarbone possibly broken. It was freezing cold, but she had on a thin dress and no shoes. He begged her to stay; drunk herself, she walked away, then returned, crying, and began to kiss him as the police tried to restore order.

About a hundred metres away, on the main street, a young woman emerged weaving from NB's nightclub. She vomited on the pavement and her own thin, glittery dress, as a friend tried to hold her head. Then she looked up at a policewoman coming over to help, and with vomit in the corners of her mouth, sweetly apologised.

It was just another Friday night in Northampton, where young Britons, often in packs, go out to get thoroughly and often violently drunk, said Inspector Vaughan Clarke of the Northamptonshire Police.

Whether as entertainment or mating ritual, the spectacle of dressed-up youth on the early morning streets barely able to walk or talk has become an issue of growing social importance, because of both the violence that alcohol often engenders and the vulnerability of young women, who are sometimes molested or raped when they are in no condition to defend themselves.

Britain's Institute of Alcohol Studies said there had been a small decline in alcohol use from its height in 2005, and the country was roughly in the middle compared with other European Union countries in estimates of litres of legally sold alcohol drunk per person.