Britain has long been proud of its notorious reputation for heavy drinking. Forty-two percent of Britons view binge drinking as “part of Britain’s culture.” Mark Hastings, a representative of the British Beer and Pub Association, proudly defends his country’s $44 billion-a-year booze industry. “Binge drinking is British,” he says.

In fact, alcohol abuse is killing Britain. It has turned the UK into a spiritually starved culture of excess and wantonness—a society drenched in sickness and despair, violence and sexual depravity.

Over the past decade, Britain’s addiction to beer and rum has exploded into a national crisis. Earlier this year, the UK laid claim to the dubious distinction of being the heaviest drinking nation in the European Union. A recent study conducted by the University College London reported that the number of people who drink excessively in Britain has tripled in just 10 years.

One out of four British adults are now considered binge drinkers.

In 2008, more than 9,000 people drank themselves to death in Britain. That represents a 125 percent jump compared to statistics from 1992.

Consider this comparison: Over the past nine years, Britain has sacrificed a little over 500 lives in Afghanistan and Iraq fighting the war against terrorism. In just one year, Britain sacrifices 18 times that many to alcohol poisoning.

And these figures are for binge drinking only. All totaled, alcoholism claims about 40,000 lives per year in Britain. Added to that, because of the recent surge in alcohol abuse, health-care officials are bracing themselves for an epidemic of liver disease.

Last year, hospitals in Britain admitted 945,000 patients due to alcohol-related incidents—an 85 percent increase since 2003. It’s a steep price to pay for Britain’s addiction to drinking. Alcohol-related hospital admissions cost the National Health Service about $4.5 billion annually.

The annual bill for alcohol-related crime is many times more than that. “Britain used to be admired for the sense of orderliness and restraint in our population,” the Daily Mail wrote earlier this year. “According to the government’s own figures, the annual bill for alcohol-related crime could be as high as £13 billion [about us$20 billion]—more than the state spends on the police or prisons” (emphasis mine throughout).

The most deplorable side of this story is how abuse of alcohol is destroying Britain’s children. Last year, the bbc reported that British teens were more likely to get drunk than any other youths in the industrialized world. According to Britain’s Department of Health, one in five young people between 11 and 15 consumes about 300 pints of alcohol per year.

And with violent, lager-laden adolescents now roaming the streets of what used to be safe neighborhoods, “no go” zones are popping up all over the country. This has turned many British communities into “the Wild West,” Prime Minister David Cameron said last week. The Tory leader said Britain’s depraved culture of excess was “taking over our streets.” Many British neighborhoods, he added, are now uninhabitable.

The female counterparts to Britain’s drunken hooligans are called ladettes—and they’re known for excessive drinking, profuse swearing and indiscriminate sexual behavior. Britain’s Family Planning Association identifies alcohol abuse as one cause of the astonishing rise in sexually transmitted diseases among girls. Last year, there were more than 500,000 new cases of stds reported in Britain. Two thirds of these infections occurred among women under the age of 25.

Abortion statistics have also increased due to binge drinking. The University College London study cited above found that “hard-drinking ladettes” are 40 percent more likely to have abortions.

As one Tory member of Parliament recently stated, Britain is now the abortion capital of Europe.

Sick Unto Death

Many commentators blame Britain’s politicians for this social catastrophe. But the root cause of the disaster is the collapse of Britain’s traditional family.

British society, once the envy of the world, is now sick unto death, as it says in Hosea 5:13. In that passage, God identifies modern-day Britain as biblical Ephraim.

More than 80 years ago, God revealed to Herbert W. Armstrong that the descendants of Ephraim were among the so-called lost 10 tribes of Israel that migrated, during Assyrian captivity, into Western Europe. These Ephraimites later settled in the land of Britain and its Commonwealth nations.

The British Empire reached the apex of its power during the early part of the 20th century. Since World War ii, however, it has been in sharp decline, as Mr. Armstrong noted in The United States and Britain in Prophecy. “Why has Britain already lost most of her colonies—her possessions—her resources, wealth, power and influence in the world?” he asked.

It’s because God, having fulfilled all the promises He made to Abraham, has now systematically removed every last one of those blessings. And it’s also because of Britain’s many sins against God’s law.

“Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which are on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!” (Isaiah 28:1). Britain’s once glorious beauty, the prophet says, is like a fading flower. Instead of exalting God’s royal law—or even the crown of their once dominant empire—it glories in its own drunkenness!

Where will it lead? Verse 3 continues, “The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden under feet.” Britain is drunk on the ways of this world, which is the primary meaning in this passage—but it is also, in a literal sense, drinking itself to death.