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Why Labour loathes the pub

Pubs are our last holdout of liberty in this authoritarian era.

Simon Evans

Simon Evans
Columnist

Topics Politics UK

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Pub landlords could soon be turned into ‘banter police’, the Telegraph warned last week. Apparently, the UK government’s new Employment Rights Bill would make employers legally liable for staff being offended by ‘third parties’, such as customers and members of the public. Hospitality bosses are warning that they could be required to put a stop to pub-goers’ ‘jokes’ and ‘boisterous’ banter. Should bar staff or pub servers overhear a vulgar or disobliging conversation, or suffer a dubious microaggression as they plonk a mixed grill down in front of a paying customer, they might well be entitled to legal redress.

This provision would be unwelcome enough, if just about weatherable, even if it were the only new imposition on the pub. But in the context of the current Labour government, who knows which Jenga block’s removal will prove to undo the structural integrity of the whole enterprise?

For if there has been one perceptible theme of Keir Starmer’s otherwise aimless regime, it is its visceral hatred of the pub. The Great British Boozer is clearly regarded with a disgust and suspicion that places it somewhere between a gammon chop that has been sitting uncovered in the Sun for a couple of days and the legacy of the British Empire.

Many of Labour’s most pub-phobic measures are presented as morally neutral preventative medicine, simply necessary to keep the world’s most-envied healthcare system afloat for another leaky, dispiriting year or two.

There’s banning smoking in beer gardens, for instance. Superficially, it may resemble a mean-spirited side swipe at smokers – one of the few communities in British life it is still okay to shame. But no. It is for their own good, apparently. Even if it forces them to drink at home, alone. Indeed, even if it leaves them literally marginalised, forced to skulk in the physical margins of life. Struggling to quit, it is not-so-subtly suggested, is a real moral failing on smokers’ part.

Another lever is alcohol duty, which chancellor Rachel Reeves is threatening to hike in her first budget. Duty on spirits, in particular, has now achieved such eye-watering levels that the optics behind the bar might best be regarded as tasteful coloured decorations, reminding one of the vessels used in a former age, like yards of ale or snuff racks. Perhaps we could make the chancellor think again about ratcheting it up yet further, by suggesting that women have been hit hardest by ‘ginflation’. Women are still just about regarded as a protected category by Labour, despite it being considerably easier to reverse one’s gender nowadays than to give up smoking. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Still, the policing of pub banter, the tedious encroachment of legal diktat into one of the few remaining parlours in modern Britain, feels altogether more sinister.

The term ‘woke madrasa’ was first coined to describe how universities and then schools, and then even early years’ daycare, ceased to be institutes of learning and have instead become de facto centres for progressive indoctrination, dripping Frankfurt School poison into the ears and erecting matrices of oppression before the eyes of malleable young minds. This phenomenon was widely regarded from the centre to the left as being another eye-roll-worthy moral panic, although anyone who doubted the veracity of the diagnosis may have wanted to revisit their verdict after 7 October.

Yet to Labour’s disappointment, some institutions still remain free of progressive groupthink. Principal among these are pubs, which ministers presumably imagine to be petri dishes of wrongthink and hate speech. In these establishments, the consumption of alcohol and the close company of friends can lead some foolish subjects to momentarily forget themselves and the New Consensus. Some may end up exchanging views, whether in earnest or in jest, that have not been approved by the central committee. This, apparently, must be stamped out.

Clearly, drunkenness should not be regarded as a licence to insult, threaten or abuse. Equally, alcohol taken in abundance does sometimes lead to intemperate speech, poor impulse control and subsequent escalation to violence (which is no doubt why those nations and cultures that forbid its consumption are famously distinguished by their peaceful, relaxed ambience, their tolerant plurality and total absence of violence). But most pub-goers, staff and landlords already know where the line is on drunk and disorderly behaviour. Banter is a different matter altogether.

Making pubs expensive enough to be a luxury enjoyed only by those who have accrued sufficient social credits is one tack. But the possibility of expensive legal action, should a member of staff even so much as overhear a conversation they disapprove of, or that makes them feel ‘unsafe’, will have a chilling effect on a pub atmosphere that would turn a cup of Horlicks into Guinness Extra Cold.

That bruising encounter Two-Tier Keir had with a pub manager during lockdown now begins to look like an origin story to rank with that moment during the White House correspondents’ dinner, when Donald Trump was humiliated by then president Barack Obama – or perhaps with the most disastrous art-school rejection in Viennese history.

CS Lewis tried to warn us about this. ‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive’, he said. Ah well. Cheer up. At least assisted dying, or ‘Esther’s Ransom’, will soon be here to provide a smooth exit from this clean-air dystopia.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.

Picture by: Getty.

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