Last Friday I enjoyed a drink with some friends at the Southampton Arms. Upon arrival we had immediately headed outside, partly because the pub was extremely crowded, and partly because, like many other people, we still enjoy a drink amd a smoke. Suddenly just as the clock struck 10 several staff appeared in the beer garden and very quickly ushered everybody inside – since 10 pm was when the beer garden had to close. Nowadays this is a very common part of the pub going experience. Usually a few people living near a pub will complain about the noise, and the council will respond by imposing what often seem to be OTT restrictions as part of the pub’s licence.

Of course, nobody would suggest that pubs be given free reign, and that the feelings of residents be given no weight. Yet, considering that pub-going is such an important and popular part of our communal culture, there needs to be some give and take (indeed the smoking drinker who is inconvenienced most by such restrictions has been forced to do rather a lot pf giving of late). The question on my mind last week was why somebody would live next to a pub if they wanted quiet by 10pm on a Friday. Granted, people are limited by their circumstances, but the pub is question was on Highgate Road in Gospel Oak, right near the Heath. In other words, local residents probably enjoy the means to exercise quite a degree of autonomy about where they live. Indeed, pubs generally are concentrated in more central locations where housing is at a premium. Surely we can expect people to move into them on the understanding that they may be kept up a little past 10 on a Friday or Saturday.

It is in fact not only concerns about noise that govern pubs outdoor spaces, but also the contemporary moral panic about people DRINKING on The STREET. In Camden Town – hardly the place where one would expect a quiet life – almost all pubs appear compelled to operate a no drinks outside rule. When combined with a “no smoking inside” rule, this can be a pain. Yet as somebody who is not overly cautious I am generally willing to leave my drink inside and watch it through the window if need be. Yet some of my female friends are understandably far more cautious about having to leave their drink unattended if they want a smoke – for them it can be far more than a minor annoyance.

Women are arguably made more vulnerable by a system of no drinks outside, no smokes inside. Yet my focus here isn’t purely on the worst possible outcome of these rules. The point is that women already face pressure not to go out and throw caution to the wind in the way that men are easily able to. Many already find themselves starting the evening by planning how they will get home for reasons men don’t have to think about. As such our night culture should be designed to make it easy for women especially do to as they wish, regardless of the threats they may face. And the current rules, I am afraid, do the opposite

With pubs still closing at an alarming rate politicians of all stripes pay lip service to the idea of supporting our pub culture. Yet they refuse to ever give the interests of pubs and their customers any priority over other concerns – whether it is the desire amongst some for quiet by 10pm on a Friday, or the amorphous and extensive concept of public order, or, in the case of the blanket smoking ban, public health. If our pub culture is going to be saved and supported, then public houses must be given some more leeway to operate in the way that we, pub going public, want them to.

I came home from work yesterday to find myself locked out of my house. I’d like to blame an evil money-grabbing landlord, I’d like to blame the council, the police, the state. I’d like to blame the man. But I can’t. The blame lies squarely at my door. The very door I found myself hammering on last night because I’d forgotten my keys. And this was just the first of many mistakes I made that evening.

Frantically trying to get hold of my AWOL housemate, fellow Third Estate writer, Reuben, I realised to my cost that I’d not thought to charge my phone. Locked out in the cold and the gathering dark with a shopping bag full of fast defrosting pizza and melting icecream, I decided to pass the time down the local pub.

After buying one pint at a cost to my pocket of £3.25, I realised it would be an expensive place to wait. Not least on account of my third mistake, not bringing very much money out with me that day.

I had no home to go to, no phone to help me sort out my situation or while away the hours sending inane texts to anyone who cared to hear my sob story, a rapidly diminishing pocketful of shrapnel and absolutely nothing to do with my time. What did I do? I bought two cans of Carlsberg and sat on my doorstep drinking them. One hundred and fifty minutes of homelessness had driven me to drink. I hasten to point out that this was the original Carlsberg, but I don’t doubt if Reuben had taken any longer to get back I would probably have turned to the Special Brew and a brown paper bag.

A can of Carlsberg very similar to the one I was drinking last night and a strange man trying to kiss me

So what did my two and a half hours of effective homelessness teach me? Life on the streets is bloody boring and there’s very little else to do but turn to alcohol. So next time you pass a drunk in the street throwing up into his shoe, spare a thought for him. And maybe let’s rethink our patronising notions of charity. Why give to the homeless if they’ll only spend it getting drunk? I did. But life on the streets is hard and there’s bugger all else to do.

She might be a Tory, but on assuming office Theresa may took a few positive steps in rolling back some of the most illiberal actions of the previous government. She put on hold the vetting and barring scheme, and scrapped ID cards. So I was a little disappointed when it was announced today that she is planning a raft of measures that will hit drinkers – and the poorer ones in particular.

First of all, she plas to change the system for licensing premises that serve alcohol. According to the home office website this will involve “making it easier for communities to have their say on local licensing by allowing local authorities to consider the views of the wider community, not just those living close to premises”. Now, I have no problem with people who would be directly affected by a pub having a say over whether it should open. Excessive noise can really affect people’s lives, and the law  in general exists to protect people from harm. The licensing system should not, however, empower “communities” (ie the local majority) to impose their tastes and sensibilities on individuals. I really don’t like eggs, and am even a little disgusted at people who like them. But I don’t expect to have a say on what a somebody on the other side of the borough has for breakfast.

Equally, May plans to start charging fees for late night licences. Getting a drink in central london past midnight can already be a pain in the arse. You often end up having to go to a club (and at 24 im already to old for that) or to some expensive cocktail bar. Charging for late licences is likely to make late night london even more like this. Those bars that sell at relatively smaller margins will go back to shutting their doors at the ridiculous time of 11pm, leaving those with the cash (and the poor taste) to sip their margaritas in peace.

The fee is being justified as a means of allowing councils to recoup the cost of policing. The home office press release tells us that “Last year there were almost one million violent crimes that were alcohol related, with a fifth of all violent incidents taking place in or around a pub or club, and almost two-thirds of these happen at night.”

I’m sure that today’s budget will be chewed over in the blogosphere pretty heavily over the next few days. I shan’t dwell on all the details. Not enough being done too late. We all agree. The government pushing this weird thing of high tech industries in their realisation that since Thatcher we’ve been kept afloat by meaningless financial products etc etc. What I do want to dwell on, though, is the increase on duty on cider.

Of course, over the last few years cider has become a far more popular drinks. The expansion of high end brands retailing at a premium, such as Magners and Bulmers have led to some sort of cider-gentrification, but nonetheless it has remained a relatively cheap way of drinking, and one that has been favoured, as a result, by many poorer people and young people. Reuben, one of our bloggers here on The Third Estate saw all of this coming. He has told us over and over again in the last year that the sort of taxes on cheap booze are effectively a way of the government allowing drinking for the rich but not for the poor, and today he was proved right with a 10% duty increase on cider.

The underlying spirit of this change is actually to do with prohibition, about the government feeling that it is their duty to protect people from themselves (only poor people, mind), but in doing so they undermine a much wider section of the population than alcoholics. Rather, all of those people living on low wages or low benefits, who like a drink every now and again and choose to drink cider are being priced out of the market. Yes, there are people with alcoholism problems in this country, and yes many of them are amongst the poorest members of society (note, there is an issue of cause and effect here! It is not because people are of some underlying morally dubious self-destructive character that people become alcoholics and are also poor, rather poverty is very much a cause of people turning to alcoholism) But the solution can never be prohibition by stealth.

Reuben has been right all along, and it should not be up to the poorest members of our society, taking pleasure in some of the few luxuries they enjoy, to pay back money that has been stolen from them by banks and financial corporations.

Like most people I like to think of myself as more complicated than one particular social, philosophical or political theory can pigeonhole. I am full of contradictions and exceptions. As Chris Rock said:
“I got some shit I’m conservative about, I got some shit I’m liberal about. Crime – I’m conservative. Prostitution – I’m liberal.”
Even my attitude to Chris Rock is ambivalent – I love him when as a feminist I should be protesting outside his gigs out of principle. I can forgive a lot of misogyny for occasional nuggets of comedy gold.

Even politicians are rarely 100 per cent in agreement with everything their party stands for – and those that pretend they are 100 per cent in agreement are only doing so in the hope of advancement. No-one is ever that clear cut (and as a journalist I can tell you, there are some ministers you can’t interview without a clothes peg due to the acrid stench of desperate sycophancy).

I’m not a sycophant but I am a raging hypocrite. I’m all for civil liberties and freedoms – except when they rain on my parade. I’m all for you being able to do what you want to do, however much I disagree with it – until it impinges on my quality of life (and the quality of life of others – I’m a hypocrite but I’m not an egotist). Then I want you forcibly removed from my garden.

I bring this up because this week the government has rewritten the licensing rules and launched a new crack down on drinking games in pubs and clubs. The ruling class killjoys.

The libertarian in me says “how dare they?” The freedom of expression advocate in me is concerned. The side of me that hates the nanny state is in total recoil. However, there’s a side of me (the same side which likes tea and toast) that supports the idea, and worse, entertains the notion of mandatory minimum pricing for alcohol (which the government stopped short of this week for, one suspects, less than altruistic reasons).

It’s easy for me to not be bothered about defending these ‘liberties’ – the new rules won’t affect me. I’d rather chew off my own arm than go to the kind of gathering where someone is being forcefed WKD through a length of hose. I don’t like cheap booze and I don’t drink regularly in large quantities. But as a student I did. There’s nothing more hypocritical and sanctimonious than an ex-smoker, complaining about the smell of smoke – I am (almost) the alcohol equivalent.

So why the change of heart (other than impending middle age)? And what gives me the right to get all uppity about alcohol legislation? Well firstly, there’s the usual inconveniences: people vomiting on me on the tube, emboldened men flashing me, shrill women flashing me, all of them trying to fight me at the same time – to the extent that I avoid some parts of central London on Friday and Saturday nights if at all possible.

However, I also have another reason. The other day I had an asthma attack. Day-to-day it’s under control with medication but about once a year it needs hospital attention. Usually I go to hospital for an hour on the ventilator and some steroid tablets. But this attack happened on a Saturday night. On Saturday night you have to wait longer in the A&E department because of all the drunks. You wait, avoiding the vomit as alcohol-related accidents, assaults and self-induced comas are wheeled past you by harassed staff. I decided to take my chances and wheeze on into Sunday morning at home (I must stress that I was being monitored by my family and there was an agreed stage by which I would have no say in the matter). I don’t know a single person in the medical profession who isn’t for tougher regulation of alcohol. And they were once medical students – medical students are legendary drinkers – which makes them even more hypocritical than me.

Alcohol is a big killer in this country – not just of those who imbibe it, but of everyone around them. The changes the government introduced are a paltry act of tokenism aimed at appeasing the supermarkets and the drinks industry – and this from the party who invented the nanny state?

The fact is, most social, political and philosophical ideas are better in theory than in practice – and it’s this that makes them impossible to adhere to. Hypocrisy? Maybe, but I live in the real world and it’s not straightforward either.

Today Chris Grayling - shadow Home Secretary – revealed that the Tories plan to continue Labour’s slide into social authoritarianism, but with a social twist.

As Tories go, Grayling is certainly not at the libertarian end of the spectrum. As I reported in one of my previous posts, he has pushed  proposals to subject young people to arbitrary police justice, with no regard for due process or innocence until proof of guilt. Today he announced a package of measures on alcohol. Most notably, he advaced plans to rapidly increase taxes on particular bevarages: namely alcopops, strong beer and strong cider. The telegraph reports that under his proposals would push up the price of a 4-pack of lager  by £1.33 and alcopops by a whopping £1.50.

Not only is this a disgusting use of fiscal policy to punish legitiamte lifestyle choices. It is also blatant class legislation. The singling out of alcopops, strong beer and strong cider has no objective logic to it. It is evidently not simply about targetting the easiest ways to get pissed. Indeed my investigations indicate that a bottle of port and a 4 pack of tennents super contain roughly the same amount of alcohol and can both be bought for around £6.

Indeed there are no prizes for guessing why the latter was not included in the proposed tax hike. By picking out alcopops, and strong beer and cidre, Grayling is tagetting the demons of Middle England, the kind of people who make daily mail readers tut.

Other proposals include higher levies for venues that stay open after 11. The reality is that the vast majority of venues that serve alcohol after our ridiculously early traditional closing time are not associated with any trouble. As I have said before the link between booze consumption and anti-social behaviour is weak and questionable. The vast vast majority of people who get boozed up – the third estate included – do not engage in any criminal behaviour.

There was a moment when I entertained the idea that while the tories will be terrible for britain, and terrible for ordinary people in particular, they might role back some of NewLab’s social authoritarianism. Yet it appears that in spite of the party traditionally containing a libertarian element, we will have no such luck. They remain committed to the smoking ban, too shit scared of new labour’s faux-class politics to oppose the hunting ban (and let’s be clear, stopping the squires shouting ‘tally ho’ IS faux class politics), remain keen to harness the same old paranoia about booze, and even keener on arbitrary justice.

With 40 pubs shutting down every week, the continued news of pub closures fills 99% of me with sadness, and 1% of me with an almost unbearable smugness. I am sad not simply because I enjoy going to the pub, but because as I explained in a previous post, pubs are a social and communal good. In our crowded cities, north European climate, and inhospitable and over-regulated streets, pubs represent a crucial source of public space. Why a tiny part of me is unbearably smug will become clear.

When the idea of a smoking ban was first broached I had yet to become addicted to the fine pleasure of tobacco, but nonetheless I was opposed to its implementation on grounds of civil liberties. Yet – as is becoming increasingly clear – I could just as easily have opposed it on the grounds of self-interest. Whenever the ban was discussed many people asserted  their right to go to the pub of their choice without sitting in a smokey environment if they do not wish.  In this post-fordist age, consumption is – more than ever – constructed as an individual act. People are no longer content with a black model-T. They want a car that is just right for them.  By the same token if people go to the pub it is their right not to have their experience contaminated by somebody else’s unwanted habits.

Yet the thing is that going to the pub is, by its nature, an enormously collective form of consumption. Here in London you will pay about three times as much in the pub for your beer as you would in a supermarket. Now there are various reasons for that, but one of them is that you are paying  – not unreasonably – to sit in a well maintained space smack-bang in the middle of where lots of cool shit is going on.  Now obviously  nobody could shoulder this burden alone. Instead pubs rely on lots of people effectively paying for that collective space to be maintained. Whether you like it or not, when you choose to enjoy a pub you are enterring into a relationship with other people using it.

And when you enter into a relationship with people you have to compromise. You might have to listen to loud music which you do not like but other people do. By the same time you cannot expect the environment to be smokeless just because you feel like drinking in pub x and want to drink in pub x without encountering any smoke. Non-smokers , concieving of their pub outings to be purely individual forms of consumption felt justified in relying on the law to ensure that their pub outings were exactly as they wished. Perhaps when their local shuts down – and pub-shutdowns increased by approximately 100% after the smoking ban – they will be pushed to conceive of pubs and pub-drinking differently.

Stats recently published in the Telegraph show that the number of pubs in Britain has declined by more than 10 per cent in the past decade. By the end of the year, it is forecasted that there will be just 52,000 pubs in the UK compared with 61,000 a decade ago.

So why should we be worried? The answer has nothing to do with that sentimental bollocks about protecting traditional english culture. Nor is it about maintaining an abundance of places to get hammered. Rather it is because pubs represent one of the most important sources of public space for communities throughout this country.

An obvious point I might begin by making is that Britain – notwithstanding the current weather – is a cold and wet country. People need and want places outside the home where they can meet and converse, and by and large they want those places to be sheltered from the elements. In this sense pubs -as places where you can simply meet, relax and speak in the company of others – are an almost unique resource. Unlike London restraunts, you don’t have to pay silly money for the luxury of sitting there until your table is very assertively cleared. If you so wish, a 3 quid pint will get you through to closing time.

But the role of pubs – communal and cultural – is so much greater than this. Where do you think music comes from? Believe it or not, not many rockstars begin by playing at the 02. Day in day out, the backrooms or basements rooms of our public houses will be hosting open mic nights and smaller gigs. There will be niche audiences listening to the kind of music that doesnt get airplay on mtv. There will be comedy. There will be activists like us, who need a warm, cheap and convenient place for their public meetings.

In a privatised but squashed together metropolis like london, we get a great deal simply from pubs existing. They are good for us individuals and they are good for our culture. But as a society we do not show them a lot of love. Notwithstanding the very partial relaxation of Britain’s absurd liscensing laws, the Labour government’s policy over the past decade has basically been anti-pub. The ban on smoking combined with repeated above-inflation increases in the beer tax have made it increasingly difficult for pubs to survive, and to continue providing these crucial communal spaces. It is my opinion that the government does not simply need to moderate its policy. Instead what we need is an about turn. Instead of seeing pubs primarily in terms of the social ills with which they are (dubiously) associated, public policy should be premised on the idea that pubs are a social and cultural good. Policy makers should be concerned with ensuring that pubs survive and flourish.

It would appear from this week’s NUS conference that many of the delegates consider themselves not as representatives of our concerns and interests, but instead as elders of the student community charged with sanitising our wretched lifestyles.

The Telegraph reports that the NUS have decided to lobby for an end to cheap beer in student bars.  Yes you read that that right. Our representatives – backed by new labourite president Wes streeting – are lobbying to make it more expensive for us to go and drink .

First off, who on earth do these people think they are? Do they honestly imagine that the students of this country formed a union because they wanted to elect people to act as their parents. Do they even understand what a union is?

And what on earth do they think will be the impact of such a move? I believe the effect of this policy will be to make student culture  less democratic and more exclusive.  Whether we like it or not (and personally I loved it) student culture revolves substantially around drinking. Even in Cambridge the student bar was a place where students from the widest variety of social backgrounds (not withstanding a few upper middle class boys playing at being aristocrats) would coalesce, sometimes to get inebriated but more often to argue about the world over a pint or three. Quite simply prices were low enough for everybody.

It is clearer than ever  that our much lauded president Wes Streeting is not merely a New Labour loyalist, but is somebody who has New Lab DNA running through his veins. We have  seen how Labour has moved, from seeking to improve the material conditions of those worse off, to seeking to improve their well being by interfering with their lifestyles. In much the same way, Streeting has now pushed the union into dropping its opposition to tuition and is seeking to looking after us by reengineering our social culture – at our expense.

Liam Donaldson – the UK’s Chief Medical Officer for the past decade – is something the crusader. The smoking ban , which he describes as his ‘greatest achievement’, does not appear to have satiated his appetite for reshaping our lifestyles. Thus he is unveiling plans to set a minimum price for alcohol of 50 pence per unit.

To my shock, the Labour government – which up until now has pursued an obsessively paternalistic agenda – has taken the right approach to these ridiculous proposals. Gordon brown has come out and said that he is unwilling to punish the vast majority of responsible drinkers, not least during a recession. Indeed it is well known that the booze tax like the tobacco tax hits the poor hardest. Meanwhile the Lib Dems, to their discredit, have said that they support an end to ‘pocket-money priced’ alcohol. I am imagining that the likes of Clegg and Huhne might have a different conception of ‘pocket-money prices’ from the great mass of society.

Aware that boozing is, in most circumstances, considered a personal choice, Liam Donaldson has defended his proposals by pushing the concept of ‘passive drinking’. ‘England’, he says, ‘has a drink problem and the whole of society bears the burden. The quality of life of families and in cities and towns up and down the country is being eroded by the effects of excessive drinking.’ There is so much one can say here. Does he imagine that the quality of life enjoyed by families will be improved by eroding their real incomes through higher alcohol prices? Meanwhile, I simply don’t believe that alcohol causes anti-social behaviour in the way many people reckon it does. Yes the two often go together on a Saturday night in Swindon, but, as anyone with a background in social sciences understand, Correlation is by no means necessarily indicative of causation. I am sure my fellow Third Estaters will back me up when I say that the student culture at Cambridge is characterised by massive amounts of boozing, but that violence and the threat of violence is absent like it is nowhere else.

More generally the notion of ‘passive drinking’, as something comparable to passive smoking, is simply ridiculous. Smoking – as a chemical process, in and of itself – has the capacity to physically harm those other than the smoker. Drinking on the hand does not. Unlike tobacco, when I drink alcohol, it does not seem into the bodies of those around me. Rather it is generally thought to be associated with certain kinds of behaviour which may harm others. Needless to say, if you start punishing activities because they might be associated with other activities, you effectively have a mandate to police every individual choice or decision no matter how personal.

Sometimes the way in which a person constructs a sentence can offer a real insight into they think. Consider the following comment that Liam Donaldson made to the times a couple of years back:

“The first thing you see when you walk into a supermarket is a wall of cigarette packets, we need to do something about that, and let’s get the cigarette out of Kate Moss’s mouth.”

“Let us (presumably society) get that cigarette of Kate Mosses mouth”!!! While I object to the idiotic expectation that celebrities should be role models, it is not so much the sentiment that I mind here. Rather it is the way in which it is expressed which fills me with discomfort. Liam Donaldson could, of course, have said ‘let’s get Kate Moss to stop smoking. But instead, Kate’s body is presented as a passive object, with which society should interfere. In fact Kate – in her entirety – doesn’t even get a mention. It is sufficient to simply state what we – society – need to do to her mouth. We are, then, dealing with a man who very way of thinking runs counter to any notion of autonomy over one’s own body.