Taxation of beer in the UK had a direct effect on elections, but also in the % alcohol of said beer. It's no surprise the amount of drink consumed in the UK wen

Taxation of beer in the UK had a direct effect on elections, but also in the % alcohol of said beer. It's no surprise the amount of drink consumed in the UK went down in the Victorian and early Edwardian era, pretty much as the rise of working class voters and the tax base from income taxes, and the national debt rose. Prohibition movements may have existed before then but Temperence movements really got on in that time. BTW the meme that "people drank alcohol to avoid bad water" was knocked out. It's bad history. People knew how to make water drinkable. If they drank wine or beer it's because they liked it. In this period, Joseph McCabe in "ten years in a monastery" writes of the prodigious amounts of booze sunk by novitiates and brothers, all the time, across the Catholic monastic system. He was a bit biassed having gone over the wall to humanism/socialism before writing about the evils of religion but he had been on the inside, I think he knew what he was talking about.