ANYONE who packs in his job at the age of 51 and loses a pile of pension rights in the process because he cannot stomach the affront it entails to his own standards has got to be a person of principle.

Hats off, then, to Mr Michael Birkett, who has quit as Britain's official representative on the island of Ibiza - in disgust at the behaviour of holiday-making "degenerates" from this country.

There will, of course, be many who will regard ex-vice consul Mr Birkett as a stuffy, out-of-touch, anti-fun old bore.

Indeed, the co-owner of one of Ibiza's numerous "rave" clubs that specialise in catering for the bed-hopping, drunken, drug-taking young holidaymakers who Mr Birkett says are dragging Britain's name through the mud, said just that.

"It probably just demonstrates the generation gap between club-goers and the people who work in the consulate.

"Sex and drugs is what Ibiza is about," he remarked.

Maybe it is.

But isn't this outlook - and the portrayal as TV entertainment of the routine yobbishness, drunkenness and sexual depravity of holidaymaking Britons not just in Ibiza, but also in Corfu and the Caribbean - pandering to the view that it's all right because everybody's doing it? Hark, for instance at the unambiguous spiel in the Club 18-30 brochure ..."Stay out all night, try sex in the surf, snog the waiter, don't sleep for 24 hours."

What this translated into for Mr Birkett was 18 months of having to sort out the mess of yobs landing in jail, suffering drug overdoses and getting themselves in traffic accidents and him giving up in shame and revulsion after Ibiza's daily newspaper branded English holidaymakers as "animals."

British travel firms and plenty of the complaining Ibizans are happy to make fat profits catering for such suntanned swine.

And this is what is really wrong.

For they are perfectly free to indulge the debauched desires of the alcohol and drug-sodden, nose-studded, tattooed, bleach-blond morons of both sexes who are characteristic of today's young people?

And as long as business is permitted to make profit out of this age group and its self-indulgent behaviour, we should not be surprised that we are regarded as animals aboard and that every weekend our own streets are strewn with litter and broken glass and streaked in vomit.

And they're your kids, folks. Ugh!

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.