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Forgive me if i've misunderstood
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Forgiven.
a) licenses are for *sale* of alcohol, not its consumption. I'm currently enjoying a nice refreshing lager after my Sunday roast, and I don't need a bloody license from some interfering bureaucrat to do that. Tescos, however, needed a license to sell it to me.
b) This being Britain and a free country with a long tradition of liberty, one of our main legal principles is that things are legal unless there's an explicit law against. In the case of the Tube, there was no law against drinking and you were free to consume alcohol. Obviously being drunk and disorderly or vandalising the train was already illegal, as was assaulting a member of staff (which they tend to take very seriously, and the assaults last night aren't going to help Boris get Tube staff onside as his front-line troops against this imaginary wave of crime).
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As for this fiasco,only in backward Britain would it be tolerated.
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Er, no. It's happened in several other places, too, notably Moscow. In other countries, however, it's quite normal to see people drinking on the way home from work, IIRC you could indeed buy beer on the station platform at Hamburg Hauptbahnhof when I lived there, and it was common to see stout German businessmen cracking open a can to relax on the way home. Mind you, cannabis possession was legal too. Free country, d'ye see?