The politics of drinking
             July 20, 2010

Pubs and the Big Society

Margaret Thatcher thought there was no such thing. David Cameron wants a really big one. Of course, these apparently opposed views of ‘society’ are both about the rolling back of the state, it’s just the strategies that are different. Thatcher’s privatisation was cloaked in a rhetoric of individualism and free enterprise. Cameron is pushing through massive cuts to the welfare state and trying to make it sound all rather super.

His Big Society has a long history, as Jonathan Raban explains in a recent issue of the London Review of Books. The idea goes back to G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and is experiencing a revival thanks to a book that’s obviously influenced Cameron, Phillip Blond’s Red Tory, the subject of Raban’s review.

Blond harks back to idyllic rural pre-industrial communities that never really existed and couldn’t possibly exist today. It is a regressive right-utopian vision that we shouldn’t take seriously.

And the pub is somehow mixed up in it. Cameron wants people to take over threatened pubs, though it’s not yet clear how the government intends to help make this happen.

We have quite a few happy stories now about locals banding together to run their pub, but it’s not easy. It’s not easy for experienced operators at the moment, so I’m not sure this is, on any great scale, a solution. Certainly not without substantial funding at any rate. And that doesn’t seem likely.

But why is the pub so important to the Big Society? It was Belloc, famously, who coined the quote seen on the walls of many bars: “When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England”. And Chesterton wrote a strange little dystopian novel called The Flying Inn set in an England run by as Islamic sect that’s closed all the pubs. (I’m writing about this for a future issue of the Brewery History journal, so keep a look out.)

A fuzzy utopian fantasy needs something to bring it into focus, and it’s the pub that’s been recruited to do that job. People know pubs. They like pubs. They feel good in them, feel a part of something bigger.

Back to diary archive