The middle-aged woman sprawled on the ground in front of me, in her black dress and perilous night-out heels, will definitely have a headache in the morning. She'll deny it was the booze of course, however much she has had, just as her son will deny it was the booze that caused him to tumble backwards into her as he was ejected from the pub for being drunk and unruly, so that her head hit the pavement with a dead clunk. He'll continue to insist the doormen assaulted him, even though the police have already checked the CCTV footage and satisfied themselves they did nothing of the sort.

It is the Saturday night of the August Bank Holiday weekend, and in the pedestrianised heart of Basingstoke, a tidy shopping street punctuated by vast neon-clad drinking halls, the Hampshire constabulary are busy policing the night-time economy. They call an ambulance for the mother, tell the son to calm down and take a cab to the hospital. They disperse the drink-sodden crowd that has gathered to watch.

If you don't include the two drunks with stab wounds (thought to be self-inflicted) who were dealt with earlier on, and the 'yellow cards' issued for anti-social behaviour - pissing in doorways, shouting abuse in the street - this is the first major incident of the night. There's more to come, though. A little while later we get reports of an unprovoked attack. We find the victim perched on the kerb just down from Market Square nursing a bleeding cut to the brow that will need a stitch or two. 'This bloke came from nowhere,' says his friend. 'He was really drunk, he was. He said, "You're lucky I didn't take your face off, you bald bastard".' Steve still has it in him to smile at the reference to his prematurely bald pate. Another cluster of police. Another ambulance. Later still there's a third incident: a drunken brawl in the street, one woman stamping on the head of another. 'Remarkable,' says the officer who just happened by. 'She lifted up her foot and down it came.'

But the really remarkable thing about all this, the really troubling thing, is that, according to the Basingstoke police, it is 'a quiet night'. Although they would like me to think it was down to smart policing - which partly it is - they also know it's the luck of the draw. 'Last night was hectic,' another officer says to me. 'We had two colleagues assaulted, punch-ups, the works.' This, they say, is the reality of binge drinking in Britain today. 'Town centres used to be butcher, baker, pub,' PC Mark O'Hanlon says. 'But now there are big out-of-town supermarkets, so the butchers and the bakers become pubs too, and huge ones at that.' In come the promotions: the two-for-one deals, the rock-bottom discounts on pints, the drink-all-you-like-for-£20 offers. And the police are the ones who have to clean up the mess.

Britain keeps going out on the piss. Tony Blair has labelled binge drinking - generally defined as necking twice the recommended daily number of units, four for men, three for women - as 'a new British disease'. For once this does not appear to be spin. The statistics speak for themselves: each year 14 million working days are lost due to alcohol abuse. Half of all violent crime - around 1.2m incidents a year - is attributed to binge drinking. At weekends 70 per cent of all admissions toA&E are the result of boozing. A study just released found that two-thirds of all ambulance calls on Friday and Saturday nights in London are alcohol related, costing the service nearly £20m. Bingeing accounts for 40 per cent of all drinking occasions among men and 22 per cent among women and the numbers are rising all the time, particularly in the 18 to 24-year-old group.

'It's a major problem,' says Stephen Green, Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, and spokesman for the Asso ciation of Chief Police Officers on the issue. 'I would put it second only to gun crime and drugs. Alcohol drives all violent crime, except that associated with guns. The obvious side is the alcohol-fuelled disorder outside of pubs and such like,' he says. 'But equally, so much domestic violence and racist violence is attributed to alcohol too.' We're not just drunk, he says. We're drunk and angry, out of it and up for it.

How did we get like this? Why is Britain the binge-drinking champion of Europe? Other nations, the French and the Italians for example, drink more than us but it's spread out across the week. The Scandinavians are famous for their bingeing, but they do it less regularly than us. Only the British get furiously intoxicated every week. The answer, according to the experts, lies in a curious set of legal and social changes unique to this country, going back over almost two decades.

'First you have the death of the traditional manufacturing industries and the chronic drinking culture that went with it,' says Stephen Green. 'Blokes going down the pub for a pint or two after work. As the factories closed down, that came to an end, which hit the profitability of the drinks industry.' That, he says, was compounded in 1989 by the decision of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission to end the tied system, whereby the breweries owned the pubs that sold their products. Back then, all the breweries had to do to sell booze was unlock the pub doors. Now they had to market themselves. 'The chain of accountability between pub and brewery was gone,' Green says. 'I'm sure it made sense in terms of trade but in terms of the selling of a dangerous drug it was a disaster.'

The final part of the jigsaw came direct from youth culture and the rave scene. The restaurateur Oliver Peyton, who made his first fortune importing hip alcohol brands Sapporo beer and Absolut vodka, saw it first hand as a club promoter. 'People on the scene just didn't drink alcohol,' he says. 'They had their pills and a bottle of water and they were happy.' Alcohol sales plummeted. 'I believe the industry then decided they needed to come up with products that would appeal directly to that lost demographic.' Green agrees. 'There was a deliberate decision by the breweries not to compete with each other but to compete with ecstasy and water.'

Naturally, the drinks industry will never admit such a thing, but the chronology is more than convincing. In June 1995, just as rave culture was breathing its last and more alcohol-friendly cocaine was becoming the drug of choice, Bass launched Hooper's Hooch, an alcoholic lemonade, beating Merrydown's Two Dogs into the market place by a month. In September of that year Thornlodge came up with Mrs Puckers alcoholic lemonade drink which was followed in December by Lemonhead from Carlsberg-Tetley. The following year United Distillers launched Sweet, a whisky-based version of Irn-Bru, Bass diversified into orange-and blackcurrant-flavoured versions of Hooper's Hooch and Whitbread joined the scrum with Shotts. The age of the alcopop was upon us, and in12 months sales tripled.

'Learning to drink used to be a rite of passage,' says Richard Phillips, chief executive of the charity Alcohol Concern. 'It was something you had to work at because there weren't drinks targeted at you. There was a pathway from childhood to adulthood which made it a stepped experience.'

In other words, booze tasted pretty nasty and you had to acquire a taste for it, or face the embarrassment of ordering a snowball - Advocaat and lemonade, the 13-year-old girls' favourite - at the bar. But you didn't have to acquire a taste for Two Dogs or Lemonhead. Outside Phillips's office, spread across the top of some dusty filing cabinets, is their collection of alcopops: drinks with names such as Thickhead and Buzz. There's banana-flavoured Super Milch and Dr Thirsty's Strong Orange Punch and something worrying called Beetlejuice. None of these is less than 4.9 per cent alcohol and some of them - Strong Cider Shock, sold in a lightbulb-shaped bottle, or TNT, which looks like a stick of dynamite - are 8.4 per cent.

'The number of young people getting drunk has doubled in the last 10 to 15 years,' Phillips says, 'And in epidemiological terms that's huge.' Again, the industry has long denied alcopops were being marketed to the under-18s and point to the warnings on every bottle (though, in 1997, a newspaper investigation caught brewery executives admitting exactly that). But underage drinking, outside of pubs and bars, is still a huge problem. Basingstoke police have recently been issued with bottle-openers so that if they catch under-18s down the park with bottles - usually WKD, Bacardi Breezer, and Smirnoff Ice - they can open them and pour the booze away.

Meanwhile that first generation of alcopops drinkers are now the ones thronging the new-style drinking halls on Britain's high streets: the branches of Yates, Hogshead and Wetherspoons that have filled the high-street gaps left by those traditional shops moving out. Between 1997 and 2003, the capacity of Nottingham's licensed premises jumped from 65,000 people to 110,000. 'That, says Stephen Green, wearily, 'is a massive increase in capacity.'

If you want to get to grips with the realities of binge drinking take a look at Chris Greenhaugh's face: the circular scar on his nostril, the half-moon shape across his cheek. Better still take a look at the photographs of his nose before his recent reconstructive surgery to repair the massive damage done when part of his nose was bitten off during a drunken brawl. 'It was six years back,' says Chris, a 29-year-old bus driver from Hackney in north London. 'I'd gone out for a drink with some mates to a nightclub in Mile End.' It was moderate drinking, he says. Just the five pints. They went for a kebab and then down to a minicab office to get a ride home. 'We're waiting for our cab and these four blokes come in,' he says. 'They're very mouthy to everyone.' Words were said and then it went off. 'There were two of them on me. I got a punch in the head, then somebody bit my nose. I just thought it was bleeding.' He stumbled to a toilet at the back of the office. 'I looked in the mirror and realised that a chunk of my nose was missing.' The blokes that did it, he says, 'were seriously tanked up, up for trouble'. And then he says: 'Britain's got a problem with the booze. You go into bars and clubs and immediately you see it, people pissed and up for fights.'

Chris's nose was saved by the facial surgeon Iain Hutchison. In the late Nineties Hutchison and colleagues conducted research into how many of the facial injuries seen by accident and emergency departments were alcohol related. They calculated that it was responsible for around 125,000 serious facial injuries a year - caused either by falling over, other accidents or assaults - at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds a year to the NHS. Through the charity he founded, Saving Faces, Hutchison has gone into schools to warn teenagers that binge drinking doesn't just lead to an almighty hangover. 'Facial scarring is something you carry around for life,' he says. 'And that message can be a good way to discourage people. The message is: save your face. Drink sensibly and slowly.'

I ask him what things the government can or should be doing. 'The problem with politicians,' says Hutchison, 'is that they want quick results. But this is not something that can be solved quickly. It requires cultural change. Too often this government has looked like it's thrashing around looking for a solution.' It is hard to disagree. In 1996, the year before New Labour came to power, the Portman Group introduced a voluntary code of conduct on the naming, packaging and merchandising of alcoholic drinks, designed to deal with the excesses of the alcopops craze. The code has been updated twice since then and, for the most part, the government has seemed content to let the industry continue regulating itself.

In 1998 the Department of Health was charged with framing an alcohol harm reduction strategy, but failed to do so. In July 2002, it was announced that Downing Street's strategy unit would now be looking at the issue. Eventually, in March of this year, six years after it was first mooted, the strategy was published. It was a collection of good intentions and unarguable commitments, backed up by few targets, no statute and precious little money. 'We currently spend £95m on alcohol-harm treatment in this country,' Richard Phillips says. As Alcohol Concern has pointed out, Smirnoff Vodka spent two-and-a-half times as much to rebrand itself recently.

The tragedy is that there are ways to make a difference. The accident and emergency unit of St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, has shown that, if you can identify binge drinkers as they come in for treatment, you can then deliver advice which, coming from a health professional, has an impact. 'GPs' contracts have just been renegotiated,' says Phillips. 'They could have made alcohol harm reduction work part of the contract, as they did in the past with smoking reduction. They didn't do so. It was a missed opportunity.'

At exactly the same time as the alcohol harm reduction strategy was being devised, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport was also working on a new licensing act, which would sweep away the statutory 11am to 11pm licensing hours. The Licensing Act 2003 has been portrayed in the media as paving the way for a 24-hour drinking culture. It won't, but it will result in change. Instead of there being set drinking times, local authorities will now be able to decide for themselves when pubs and bars can close. They could insist that they stick on 11pm - or let them go through to the small hours. It was hoped that by removing the 11pm chuck-out, we would all suddenly become relaxed southern Europeans. Out would go the desperation of last orders. The streets would not throng with beered-up boys looking for a punch up, but instead with gently tipsy young men holding clutch bags and giving their ladies roses. Or something like that.

But, as Hutchison says, that demands long-term cultural rather than legislative change. Shortly after the act was passed in July 2003, the club and vice unit of the Metropolitan Police produced a confidential assessment of its impact upon their work. It forecast a massive leap in violent crime. 'The flashpoints that traditionally occur between 11pm and 5am may be reduced in intensity,' the report said, 'but will occur with increased frequency.' More drunks out for longer would mean more fights, more rapes, more assaults on police.

Guidance on how to implement the licensing act was meant to be published in August of last year. Then the Met report was circulated and the brakes went on. The guidance didn't appear until this March, and the dates for the act's implementation keep being moved back. 'One suspicion is that the government hopes to move it all back far enough so that any rise in crime figures will not be seen until after the next general election,' says a source with knowledge of the process.

'If we get it wrong and end up with a 24-hour version of what we have now,' says chief constable Green, 'The social consequences will be horrendous. You would not find an official in the Home Office who does not agree with my views and, while I do not want to speak for him, I know the Home Secretary shares them too.' There has, he says, been a cross-departmental fudge between the Home Office, which is responsible for policing the night-time economy, and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which is responsible for licensing it. 'When I look at what comes out of the Home Office and out of the DCMS, it's clear to me they are not working together.' (Despite repeated requests, the government failed to put forward a minister to comment.)

In the meantime the onus goes back on to the industry where, eager not to be regulated by statute, the two great buzz words are now 'social responsibility'. Even a drinks behemoth such as Diageo - producers of every thing from Baileys and Bell's whisky to Red Stripe and Smirnoff - has its 'social responsibility' unit. I ask its head, Kate Blakely, why. 'People want to feel good about working here at Diageo,' she says. 'And being socially responsible is part of that.' But isn't it just a marketing position? 'That's highly cynical. I think people here genuinely care about the health of industry and the health of the consumer.'

Ah, yes, the consumers. What do they think? Time to return to the heart of binge-drinking Britain, this time to Bridge Street in Guildford, a 100-metre stretch clustered with huge drinking halls, each one thumping with music, and offering cheap drink deals. There's a Yates and a Wetherspoons, a Bar Med and a Bar Zuka and a club fittingly called 'The Drink'. In Edwards, another uberpub with a dedicated shots bar and pitchers of Malibu cocktail at £7, I find Gareth. He's cheery and a little pissed - but not as pissed as he's going to be. 'I'll probably have about 10 bottles of beer tonight and a couple of pints.' I wonder how many units that is. 'About 25 to 30,' he says. He manages a pub so he knows. I point out that the weekly limit for men is 28 units. He shrugs. 'I can have a good time if I drink five pints or 10 pints. Basically everybody here is going to get out of control. That's what this is about.'

Standing with him is his mate, Mark. 'I work my arse off from Monday to Friday as an engineer in the petrochemical business and during the week I don't want to go out,' he says. 'So on Friday nights I'm going to have some beers. I'm going to have 10 or 11 beers.' But how do you feel on Saturday morning? He laughs. 'I feel like shit, but I don't have to go to work. Yes I may be damaging myself, but that's my right.'

And then there's their friend, Vicky. Nice, sensible-looking Vicky who manages a sports shop and who has had the day off. She has been drinking since lunchtime, and is clutching a bucket-glass of red wine which she admits is 'seriously rank'. How many has she had? 'I don't know. I think I've drunk myself sober.' How would she respond to the government which says her behaviour is dangerous?

She leans forward and shouts at my notebook: 'I would say, "Fuck off." I work hard and I want to play hard.'

And there, in that statement, is the debate on binge drinking distilled. The doctors, the ministers and the police may see it as an argument about violent crime, facial scars and anti-social behaviours. But for Britain's binge drinkers themselves it's not about any of this. It's about a spanking good night out, and nothing else.