The sad demise of New Year’s Eve

This year’s New Year’s Eve ‘celebrations’ in London were a reminder of just how boring the city is becoming under its mayor, Sadiq Khan.

The first blow was the decision by Royal Parks to close Primrose Hill, from Tuesday evening (30 December) to Thursday morning (1 January). The small park in north London has always been the best place in the city to watch the annual firework display. Over the years, it has become more and more popular, particularly for young people.

But not anymore. The park was sealed off from the public for New Year’s Eve by what residents described as ‘opaque green hoarding’. Royal Parks said the ‘gathering in open parkland’ was ‘not an organised event’ – an accurate enough description, but a strange way of describing a New Year’s do. ‘We have limited controls to ensure public safety’, it said, and as a result have ‘decided that Primrose Hill will be closed and locked’. So there.

The only thing worse than no longer being able to enjoy the London fireworks from afar was being able to see them up close at the official event. Over 100,000 people attended the mayor’s fireworks display, at £55 a pop. In return, ticket-holders received not only a view of the pyrotechnics, but also a 12-minute lecture on ‘togetherness’ – the theme selected by Khan for the display.

Why? Because, as the mayor was there to remind everyone, ‘diversity is a strength, not a weakness – it makes us richer not poorer, stronger not weaker’. Hollywood actress and Wicked star Cynthia Erivo addressed the crowd (there is an ‘events partnership’ between Universal Pictures and Khan’s office), ordering them to ‘come together, for good’. The EU flag was beamed on to the London Eye and everyone was reminded that last summer was the UK’s ‘hottest on record’ – and not in a good way. Then came the twee – a joke about Brits having an alarm clock for afternoon tea, and someone intoning that England ‘to me’ is ‘my Christian neighbours saying Happy Hanukkah mate, and Muslim mums saying Merry Christmas, love’.

The event cemented Khan’s reputation as Britain’s culture warrior-in-chief. New Year’s Eve is when everyone gets a free pass to indulge in a bit of harmless boozing and revelry. Yet here was the mayor effectively trying to turn the ‘greatest [New Year’s party] in the world’ – his words – into a woke re-education camp.

Those who were unfortunate enough to attend the display in person described being ‘penned in like sheep’ along the Thames. Apparently, you could hardly move, and it was impossible to get a drink. Those who arrived after 10.30pm weren’t let in. The only food you could get was £20 cheeseburgers. Assessments of the night were minor variations on a common theme: ‘fucking shit’, ‘fucking awful’ and ‘one of the shittest, most pointless nights I’ve ever had’.

Most people realise sooner or later that going to central London for New Year’s Eve is rarely worth the trouble – there’s too much forced enjoyment about it. But everyone learns at a different pace, and those who haven’t figured this out yet deserve the chance to create their own bad memories – without the help of Cynthia Erivo and Sadiq Khan, and all of the humourless bureaucrats that work for him.

London is far from the only city slowly suffocating New Year’s. In Paris, authorities cancelled the annual concert on the Champs-Élysées. In Tokyo, the famous countdown at the Shibuya Crossing was cancelled, too. The reasons cited for both of these were supposedly ‘unmanageable’ crowds and vague ‘security concerns’ – an allusion to terrorism. The authorities appear to be exploiting understandable public fears of terrorist attacks to clamp down on public celebrations.

It’s a thoroughly joyless, illiberal development. We appear to be witnessing the slow strangulation of large, public New Year’s parties. They are being throttled through a combination of safetyism and woke elitism. In both cases, the public would be far better served if the authorities simply left New Year’s alone.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.