I did not vote for Keir Starmer’s Labour, along with 66% of those who went to the polls. But I wasn’t unhappy with what had always seemed the inevitable outcome. Like a lot of people, I thought it was time for a change. I bought the stability line. Along with much of the population I was just plain exhausted by the Tory clown car. Maybe Sir Keir would be a slightly po-faced Tony Blair. And after all, wasn’t he fresh from smashing the Corbyn/Momentum insurgency?
The growth narrative seemed counter-intuitive, but Reeves looked serious about balancing the books and we’d seen turbo-charged growth under the last Labour government right up to the financial crisis. So what did I know?
In hindsight, there were warning signs. Angela Rayner’s employment regulations. We heard some talk about ‘social justice’ from then shadow ministers. There was the faint whiff of a moral crusade, the backdrop of Lockdown fanaticism, not to mention the total absence of humour from the leader and Ms Reeves. And as with the Democrat campaign across the pond, there seemed to be an awful lot Labour wasn’t saying.
Notwithstanding, I don’t think we were prepared for the awful, brittle gloom and, worse, the incompetence that has characterised this government in its short life so far. Much has been said about punishing pensioners and the botched Union deals, which leave the door wide open for further transport strikes and mass action by public sector workers this Winter. Businesses who were wooed by Labour before the election are now frozen with fear as the reality of punitive employment regulation and a crowing resurgence in union power begins to make decline rather than growth the future reality.
For the punch-drunk management of hospitality businesses, some still in the toughest trading environment in living memory, nothing sums up the current government’s bum vibe like Sir Keir’s proposal to ban smoking in pub gardens.
Admittedly, we all fought the Blair ban on smoking inside pubs and restaurants. Yet now even the most die-hard libertarian might be forced to concede that it has made our venues better places to be, and has saved millions from inhaling second-hand smoke. Being a sentimental old git, there’s a part of me that misses an over-flowing ashtray on a nightclub table and the smoke-filled atmos of a pub going full bore on a Friday night. But, hey, life moves on and this can safely be filed in the cabinet marked Progress.
This is different. Noone is harmed by smoking outside other than the smoker, who is well appraised of the risks. And as reported by Propel yesterday, if the ban was implemented 62% of pub landlords say it would ‘significantly’ reduce trade while a fifth would be forced to close with unimaginable consequences for tax revenue, local amenity and – yes – the mental health of communities where those pubs are located.
If the justification for this really is ‘we have to take action to reduce the burden on the NHS’ then let’s be clear about the logical conclusion of that argument. Like smoking, alcohol is a pleasure which humans have enjoyed for millennia. Some anthropologists even say that civilisation might not have happened without it. Yet alcohol is also associated with harm in a small minority of people. In fact, the NHS claims that alcohol abuse costs it £3.5 billion per annum. Last year the Public Accounts Committee in Parliament produced a damning report on government failure to take action on drink-related harms including addiction, links to violent crime and poor mental health as well as an ‘alarming increase’ in alcohol-related deaths.
I can hear the siren call already. To protect our NHS, let’s ban smoking outside pubs, and alcohol in them as well. The truth is, this is not a public health initiative. Rather, it is the expression of a new puritanism which instinctively rejects the merriment of Olde England in favour of a New Seriousness. A survey by More in Common at the end of last year found, astonishingly, a third of young people in favour of closing all nightclubs, with a significantly higher proportion among 2019 Labour voters. Just under a third of Millennials in the same survey backed the reintroduction of the Rule of Six.
Who was the politician that best capitalised on Sir Keir’s announcement? Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, of course. “The death knell of the traditional British pub may well have been sounded”, he said. “For my own part, I simply would not go to the pub ever again if these restrictions are imposed …The Puritans are on the march. We must all be controlled for our own good.”
Any policy that makes Nigel sound that good is definitely one to drop, Sir Keir. Please.
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