According to the Telegraph (graphic photos accompany article), a 999 (equivalent to 911) call every seven seconds:

In Essex, so many drunk people were arrested that all 200 of the constabulary's cells were filled, and overflow revellers had to be shipped to neighbouring Kent to be held for the night.

A huge brawl at a social club in Loughton, Essex, meant 600 rowdy revellers had to be dispersed, with two arrested for attempted murder after a 47-year-old man was stabbed in the eye and back.

In Wales, a 999 call led to tragedy when an ambulance speeding its way to an emergency ran over and killed reveller Jason Hawkes, 23, as he stood in the road outside a pub in Beddau-near Cardiff.

In one of the most disturbing incidents an ambulance was wrecked by callous thugs while parked outside the home of a sick baby boy in Tilehurst, Reading.

He eventually had to be sped to hospital in his family's own car.

Quite a change from our old image of the British.

Theodore Dalrymple on the long-term impacts of the modern welfare state:

Hilaire Belloc, in his book The Servile State, predicted just such a form of collectivism as early as 1912.... In his view, “The future of industrial society, and in particular of English society ... is a future in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed for the Proletariat, but shall be guaranteed ... by the establishment of that Proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile.” The people lose “that tradition of ... freedom, and are most powerfully inclined to [the] acceptance of [their servile status] by the positive benefits it confers.”

And this is precisely what has happened to the large proportion of the British population that has been made dependent on the welfare state.

The state action [the sweeping institution of socialist "reforms"] that was supposed to lead to the elimination of Beveridge’s five giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness has left many people in contemporary Britain with very little of importance to decide for themselves, even in their own private spheres. They are educated by the state (at least nominally), as are their children in turn; the state provides for them in old age and has made saving unnecessary or, in some cases, actually uneconomic; they are treated and cured by the state when they are ill; they are housed by the state, if they cannot otherwise afford decent housing. Their choices concern only sex and shopping.

No wonder that the British have changed in character, their sturdy independence replaced with passivity, querulousness, or even, at the lower reaches of society, a sullen resentment that not enough has been or is being done for them. For those at the bottom, such money as they receive is, in effect, pocket money, like the money children get from their parents, reserved for the satisfaction of whims. As a result, they are infantilized. If they behave irresponsibly—for example, by abandoning their own children wherever they father them—it is because both the rewards for behaving responsibly and the penalties for behaving irresponsibly have vanished. Such people come to live in a limbo, in which there is nothing much to hope or strive for and nothing much to fear or lose. Private property and consumerism coexist with collectivism, and freedom for many people now means little more than choice among goods.