The Decline of the English Pub

Rick Muir ( Last Orders at the Bar ) wrote in the in the Guardian in 2009 about the destruction of the English public house. It is one of the many depressing aspects of the degradation of public life in England that even as a child I took for granted and are now in the process of vanishing forever.

Few institutions are so central to England's culture and way of life as the local pub. Outside the home, the public house is the most popular place for English people of all ages and classes to relax and socialise. And yet pubs are under pressure.

The destruction of the British Pub is a great loss to British culture. When I returned to England from Poland briefly in 2009 it was disturbing to have witnessed how eerily listless and denatured the country has become. I left in 1998 just a year after the New Labour regime came to power.

Across Tamworth, pubs I once knew, grew up with and took for granted stand dilapidated with 'For Sale' signs on them. Those that survive exist only as boring and soulless Eateries with generic interiors. The once elegant Wolferston Arms in Shuttington is one such casualty, a unique pub that now has pseudo-chalk dish of the days and no wooden partitions.

The old names have gone. The Prince of Wales in Gungate has some zany name that sounds like an alchopop brand ( POW ) and throughout the streets stand tall poles with mounted CCTV cameras with the police monitoring potential outbreaks of violence. None of this is surprising at all.

Huge beer halls without character or historical association with bouncers there and music booming out to encourage lack of conversation and binge drinking inhabit old public service buildings like the Post Office now in Tamworth. It is now a repellant Yates' Bar with omnipresent telescreens belting out Murdoch's banal propagandistic Sky TV.

The reasons for this are not just about mysterious new "economic pressures":

......many pubs are closing, having been caught in a dangerous crossfire between changing consumer tastes, cut-price supermarket competition and the current recession. Some is due to a policy framework that makes no distinction, in terms of tax or regulation, between small community pubs and large city centre bars selling large volumes on a Friday and Saturday night.

Much is to do with New Labour's blanket smoking ban: pubs, are 'mutual tolerance centres' as the dramatist John Osborne once called them and for that reason hated by this repellent and utterly sinister regime.

New Labour has introduced legislation of a nature that reflects a morbid obsession with health and hygiene that sanitises everything it touches: every shop, pub that is small, individual and with unique character will be eradicated.

Instead the 'consumer' will be socially re-engineered to adopt the habits and tastes of the admen who can manipulate them to spend wads of cash in large shopping malls where memory and personal reflection are killed off. Pub names, as Peter Hitchens correctly emphasises in The Abolition of Britain, had names resonating with British history.

Too many British people are sleepwalking through what Henry Miller once referred to as 'The Air Conditioned Nightmare' : New Labour has created a country in which it has become increasingly impossible to live, to feel consoled, happy and at home. Tacky chain retail JD Wetherspoon Pubs are horrid places often full of only alcoholics and students.

It was not necessary to introduce the smoking ban: pubs should have been required by law to divide pubs into smoking and non-smoking sections. It was one of the last blows that has closed pubs, destroyed livelihoods and damaged English culture irrevocably. And makes England a nation an authoritarian nanny state treating adults as infantile.

One commenter defended New Labour by stating.

Those who whinge about the nanny state and the encroachment on liberty which they see as typical of the current government, and to which they attribute the decline of the pub are both sad and pathetic. This is the very same government that decided that pubs could open and close whenever they chose, and drinkers could be treated as adults.

Only New Labour wanted to maximise the profits of the large pub companies: this government tends to favour large scale corporate capitalism and it's domination over all aspects of everyday life from pubs to schools and retail outlets. Blandness and homogeneity are the rule. New Labour embraces both the nanny state and neoliberal anarchy: they re-inforce power and diminish English liberties

New Labour have benefitted the large supermarkets whose profits and dominance continue to grow. That's not some stale argument just peddled out by reactionary old codgers but by many avant garde critics of New Labour like George Monbiot in The Captive State.

Secondly giving one anecdotal example of changes in village life in the post war period is irrelevant: it's the usual shallow bleat of the trendy liberal left that all changes happen for good and progressive reasons because they are too cowardly to confront the reality.

It's true that the constant chorus of whining about England's decline can be annoying. Yet any smug progressive can try to rationalise it as the bleating of people incapable of dealing with the necessity of what just must always be "progress" and that those who demur aremerely ignorant and blinkered.

In fact, those who laud social changes as necessarily for the better more doltish than those who think nothing good has happened since 1945 at all. The stale idea that because people have always moaned about a 'Lost England' that it it can be dismissed is a very New Labour position.

With regards pubs, obviously not all pubs being lost now are great social institutions but neither are the places to which large numbers of people go to in order to neck as many drinks as possible before going on to nightclubs, the bleakest and brutal places in small market towns.

New Labour's legislation taken together has encouraged this kind of behaviour which is precisely why Rick Muir is coming up with ideas to save smaller pubs-the IPPR is actually a think tank that is progressive and close to New Labour's worldview.

That's perhaps why Rick Muir Muir omitted to mention the smoking ban: it did not only cause the decline of the English pub but it has been a factor which has driven the final nail into the coffin for so many that have now redesigned themselves as bland imitations of Beefeater Restaurants.

Liberty is different to license-only a halfwit could fail to see the difference between exercising free choice and having it to a freedom to loose control, to subordinate oneself to a mind numbing imperative of consuming colossal amounts of alcohol to forget how unsatisfying life is.

All of which has been intensified by the social and cultural changes accelerated by New Labour. Clearly, those who cannot see the connection do not want to see it and so, in typical New Labour fashion, there must be something wrong with the people who oppose it. As one person said when he opined,

These are the very same people who want nannyish rules and regulations on the sale of alcohol by supermarkets. Who want the state to cosset their favoured business with special tax breaks. Who seek government protected smoking dens. They are, in short, talking the kind of illogical nonsense which is typical of the opinions spouted in English pubs.

There is nothing 'nannyish' about having regulations on the sale of alcohol: the neoliberal market does not automatically guarantee freedom of choice. That has nothing to do with a nanny state for the greater interference of the State is made possible by the disorders created by rigged neoliberal markets.

Then there comes another specious argument,

No-one's mentioned bar staff. Why should they have to breathe other people's smoke for 8 hours a day to earn a crust?

They can work elsewhere then. The continual rotation of staff in retail chain pubs makes this argument worttless in any case.

And why should a person who does not drive and so uses the local pub have to breathe your filthy car exhaust fumes ? I have no choice but to breathe car fumes, though I do not drive. But I must use the streets. Without creating what economists refer to as "negative externalities".

Now replacing the petrol fuelled car with an environmentally friendly car is as good a goal as is getting people to stop smoking. But trying to ban car use is not going to happen because it would be economically ruinous to do so overnight.

Banning smoking in pubs was an easy target but the timing of it and set against cheap supermarket alcohol etc has killed off so many pubs. That cannot be a social good: it encourages people to get into their cars and go further afield, binge drink in the house or get smashed before going to a nightclub.

People who want a civilised evening out to talk and drink are finding it more impossible to do so: loud banal pop music, SKY telescreens with hordes of silly histrionic dolts screeching at football matches they could just as well watch at home. Is this the only social solidarity rituals these consumers actually now have ?

Britain has become a dysfunctional society: bleak, deracinated, and presided over by 'happy face fascists' who think that boxy housing estates, business parks, and shopping malls are Heaven. The places where there are no darkness.

Because people 'can't get no satisfaction' they will go mad and turn to acts of mass violence.

The need to yell at the telescreens when England play,the blub fest over Diana, the running up of English flagpoles in back gardens all testify to the strange absence of genuine communal life in Britain and some strange collective unease.

Written on Saturday, 4 April 2009