Leading article: The British disease

Saturday 08 August 2009 00:00 BST
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We are not in the business of encouraging foreign girls to impugn British manhood, but it is easy to appreciate the temptation that lurks in a bottle of Sambuca and a match, if you are confronted with the umpteenth British tourist behaving badly. The woman concerned might have been hauled before a court in Crete – while being feted by her compatriots as a heroine – but there is one youngish Briton, we suspect, who might wish he had joined the trend to a "staycation".

Nor is it only Greeks who have grown tired of their resorts being turned into replicas of British city centres after dark. Latvians have lost patience, too. Stag parties, the mayor of Riga says, put off a better class of tourist – those, and we paraphrase, who know their pissoirs from their porticos. For the third year running, British tourists were voted worst behaved in Europe. You can see why: unwelcome from the Baltic to the Med, we Brits risk running out of destinations even before we've drunk the Continent dry.

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