Even during the lockdown, my village pub was the heart of the community. Banned by law from opening its doors, it sold fish and chips through a hatch. When the rules on meeting outdoors were relaxed a little, it organized markets in its beer garden where villagers could buy homemade cakes and jams and, above all, talk to one another.
Now it stands derelict, one of 80 each month to call “last orders” for the last time. It was part of the history of these Hampshire chalk downs. In 1944, it was the scene of a shoot-out between American GIs and their military police: Two privates were killed along with the landlady, hit by an unlucky ricochet as she cleared the glasses. All that is gone now, lost in time like tears in rain.
What killed Britain’s pubs? As in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, many hands wielded the dagger. There has been a long-term shift toward healthier living. Laws against driving over the limit were enforced in earnest from the 1990s, and smoking was banned in public places from 2007. Pubs have been especially badly hit by recent rises in the social security levy and in the minimum wage.
Young Brits drink less than their parents. They also smoke less and have fewer unwanted pregnancies. Whether this is evidence of virtue, joylessness, or simply a switch to screen addiction rather than older temptations, the impact on pubs has been disastrous. More than 2,000 have closed since lockdown. At the same time, a growing portion of our population abstains from liquor on religious grounds.
Whatever the cause, the impact is a more atomized society. It is hard to stress how important pubs were to social bonding, especially in the countryside. The clue is in the name. Pub is short for “public house,” a house open to the public, a collective living room.
It was here that communities were forged. Old geezers in flat caps and young mothers, wealthy landowners and tenant farmers, drivers and teachers would discuss the petty gripes of village life and the great issues of the nation. Big events, from royal weddings to football cup finals, were turned by pubs into collective televised experiences.
Brewers and landlords were, for over a century, the bedrock of Tory support. As long ago as 1874, the great Prime Minister William Gladstone complained that his Liberal Party had been borne from office “by a torrent of gin and beer.”
These days, pubs are the natural home of Nigel Farage, Britain’s chief Trumpian. Posing with a pint in hand, he signals that he is on the side of ordinary people against remote elites.
He has a point. Even in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, some semblance of free speech survived in pubs. Winston Smith, plucking up the courage to enter one, fretted that “as usual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles and frequenting their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed.”
There was a time when Britain’s Labour Party was on the side of the proles, but no longer. Today’s Labour members of Parliament are more at home in fashionable cafés. The Orwellian vibe that still clings to pubs, a place where blue-collar workers might voice politically incorrect opinions, makes them uneasy.
Eric Hoffer, a San Francisco longshoreman and philosopher, wrote of the need for a “crowded life” as an antidote to loneliness. Pubs were where Brits enjoyed a crowded life, their bright and cheery magnetism drawing us away from our screens and into a common conversation.
That common conversation matters. The rate of immigration has driven even Britain’s woke prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, to fret about becoming “an island of strangers.” Britain’s ethnic and religious divides are bad enough without the simultaneous creation of closed online communities, believing different sets of facts, and talking past one another.
When Edmund Burke spoke of civil associations as “little platoons” he was, as usual, picking his metaphor deliberately. Platoons come together to form companies and battalions. They are part of the same army. Nationhood depends on shared patriotism.
ONE CHEER FOR THE UK TRADE AGREEMENT
Pubs were places where the soldiers in different platoons could mingle off duty, so to speak. Close them down, and we lose an important part of what makes us a people.
“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by people by which so much happiness is produced by a good tavern or inn,” wrote the greatest Tory of his generation, Dr Johnson, two and a half centuries ago. We are going to miss them more than we know.