The British State hates the Pub

The British State hates fun and, sadly, millions of pursed-lipped worrywarts who don’t go to pubs, agree with the British state.

The new year seems to have set off at a canter. Yankee troops swanned into Venezuela unmolested to arrest Nicolas Maduro, that country’s unpleasant communist caudillo. Meanwhile over in Iran half the population appear to have taken to the streets in protest against the Islamic Supremacists who rule that unfortunate land. If you get your news from the BBC you won’t have heard about this uprising presumably because it doesn’t involve either Donald Trump or Jews. Oh, and a good looking white female protester has been shot by cops in Minnesota where, in unrelated news, organised Somali criminals have stolen a cool billion in federal funding for childcare and support for children. Here in Britain the government, facing oblivion, has decided that the way to get back its lost working class support is to put all the pubs, local restaurants and tea shops out of business. All while intoning, with Orwellian genius, that the pub is the heart of the community. Labour MPs are spooked because they really do think they are the good guys despite getting banned from the King’s Arms across from their constituency office.

The British state doesn’t like pubs. I got into an awful lot of trouble twenty years ago because after listening to a Labour councillor describe the young people of Bradford as a criminal drunken rabble (because she’d been out wasting the time of police by sitting in their car finding out ‘facts’). My response referenced the essential fascism of this puritanical view of young people simply out having a good time. I made the national newspapers and headlined the regional TV. Trust me when I say that local councillors achieving this sort of coverage is never a good thing! But I’m right when I say that the British state - local and national - doesn’t like pubs. All the politicians will intone the mantra (“the pub is the hub” or some such nonsense), will get campaign pictures taken pulling a pint, and sign up to campaigns to stop another pub closing. But then those same politicians will vote for high duty, try to get the unwanted smoking ban extended to gardens, agree to the fussbuckets of public health having a say over licensing, and stand with ‘concerned’ local residents who dislike the fact that sometimes people leaving the pub aren’t as quiet as we’d like them to be.

The default position of every government in my lifetime has been that drinking is bad and drinking in public especially bad. Every chief medical officer can be relied on to tell us that even the smell of a sherry is going to take decades off your life and every public health department in the land is filled with people whose mission is, like the worst sort of Edwardian methodist woman, to get rid of the demon drink. All the work on alcohol policy for these bodies, for the NHS and for the government generally is produced by people funded by organisations born from the belief that even the tiniest sip of booze is a dreadful sin. So public health officers are ‘consulted’ over new alcohol licenses, often working in cahoots with the police who, mostly for the tidiness of order and control, would really rather that all the pubs were closed by 8pm and that wet-led pubs shouldn’t exist at all.

The current government is not content with policy creating the highest energy prices in the world, with massive hikes in business rates and with employment laws making the employment of casual staff, especially young people, expensive and onerous. Now they want to halve the drink drive limits despite the evidence from Scotland that this doesn’t reduce road deaths, it just kills off pubs and especially rural pubs. The Tories (and, tomorrow with the same policy only louder, Reform) want to fix this by scrapping business rates. Which is good but does nothing about the pettifogging regulations ranging from banter bans through fussy restrictions on vaping and smoking, to myriads of licensing conditions imposed by legions of local council worrywarts. These politicians - soon to be photographed with rictus grins pulling a pint while joshing with a landlord - would be more believable if they stated plainly that the point of the pub is to have a space, a male space in the main, where people can buy and drink good beer. But they don’t. Instead we get the familiar cant about community as if the pub is some sort of mystical institution rather than a place where blokes go to drink beer.

If you want to save the pub then start with getting the beer cheaper. Dump a load of the unnecessary regulatory burdens on these places. Get a licensing system that begins with the idea that pubs are a good thing. And tell the ghastly puritan fussbuckets in public health departments to get their tanks off the boozers’ lawns. Then tear up the ridiculous and scientifically illiterate ‘no safe level of drinking’ advice given by fake experts to decision-makers, then dump the equally unscientific 14 units a week limit advised by successive Chief Medical Officers. Give people good advice - don’t drink too much too often, don’t drink and drive - and let their good sense prevail.

Of course none of this will happen because every minister, every councillor chairing a health board and every retired bureaucrat made chair of an NHS board, will be told the same endless lies about drinking. How it costs the NHS billions, how it kills productivity and how it is a terrible drain on society in general. Followed, of course, by these same people campaigning for the Old Sun Inn to be an asset of community value in the vain hope that this will stop it turning into apartments or a day care centre because the government’s tax, employment and health policies make it impossible to run a pub there as a business.

The British state’s hatred of the pub is the most prominent of many hatreds directed against innocent pleasures by our government. There’s the snobbish dislike of vaping reinforced by Mike Bloomberg’s millions promoting lies and untruths about the risks of non-combustible nicotine sources (vapes, heat-not-burn, pouches, snus). We have a rampant and ignorant assault on gambling with the lie that on-line betting is peculiarly harmful when every piece of evidence about betting tells us it is informal and black market gambling that causes the most harm, not Dean and Matty spending £20 betting on the Sunday afternoon football. Of course the campaigners aren’t interested in the facts because they know that smoking (and any form of nicotine not from a pharmacy is smoking in their eyes) and betting are sinful.

To the fussbuckets, worrywarts and puritans, the pub sits at the heart of all this sin. It is where those lads drink pints of lager, engage in meaningless banter about something or nothing, put cash into fruit machines, stand on the terrace to vape and, very often, buy terrible ultraprocessed grub in the form of burgers and chips or pizza. How is the state going to control this epidemic of fun if there are pubs? We can’t have a bunch of tradesmen enjoying a pint before heading home for tea. We mustn’t allow Darren and Kirsty to go out for karaoke on Friday night. And we can’t allow a bunch of people to enjoy themselves on a Saturday night listening to a bad covers band while drinking five pints and a bottle of Pinot. And nice people, the sort who read the Guardian or The Times and only go to a pub twice a year, know that these sorts of pleasures are noisy, unhealthy and, while they don’t say it this way, sins against the modern cult of wellbeing and the orderliness of the state. The British State hates fun and, sadly, millions of pursed-lipped worrywarts who don’t go to pubs, agree with the British state.