The anti-smoking ban campaign group, Save our Pubs and Clubs are holding a competition to find the pub with the best smoking area. I can think of a few, but the ones I like best are, I believe, a little in breach of the law so perhaps, in their interests I will hold my peace.

Pubs that have managed to carry on creating a hospitable environment for smokers are, in a certain sense, accomodating to the ban, but they are also resisting it. This is because the ban was not really about passive smoking but, rather about making smoking a more uncomfortable experience so as to push people into stopping.

One thing you will find these days is that politicians of all stripes will profess their desire to support pubs. Doing so is good politics. It’s a nod to British tradition, and to (understandable) nostalgia for a more communitarian epoch. But we are entitled to ask what kinds of pubs they wish to support. Judged by their policy, the political class seem to approve of pubs only insofar as they don’t let anyone smoke, don’t get too noisy and don’t encourage too much drinking. In other words, pubs transmogrified into beer serving starbucks outlets are what they are willing to support. And this is hardly the kind of environnent that will induce people to pay a premium over the prices in ASDA – and so its no surprise that for all the verbal publoving from our politicians, the industry is still in decline. If we want to save our pubs and clubs then we cannot simulltaneously dragoon them into being part of the public health set up.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Democracy in Britain leaves a lot to be desired – like actual democracy, for example. Governments secure unconscionable power with 33% of the popular vote; parties run multi-million pound election campaigns, ensuring they owe some millionaire or business, something, sometime; the anachronism of the constituency MP is still firmly in place and not going anywhere – I could go on.

But we should recognise what’s of value in our political system, and I can think of nothing more valuable than Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs) and the adversarial zeal that it epitomises.

Think of it. The PM has to stand before the dispatch box, in front of a crowded chamber filled mostly with political enemies, and face half an hour of questions for which no preparation can really be taken. We can boot these people out of power with little pencils on strings once every five years or so, but the public standing of a PM can be destroyed by one bad performance (as they well know). Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan, that unflappable Tory, recounted in his memoirs that he would often have to pop to the gents’ to vomit with nerves before a performance at PMQs; a First World War veteran, he compared the experience to ‘going over the top’.  Who doesn’t want the PM to experience that kind of terror on a weekly basis?

The principal value of all this is that it makes the holding of the executive to account worth watching. This is something remarkable and very rare: compare those theatrical half hours on BBC Parliament with the legislative processes of most other countries, and you’ll see that this needs defending. Most European countries have hopelessly dull, ‘consensus’ – based affairs to sit through, and the goings on in the houses of America’s Congress could almost have been designed to make the savvy American voter change the channel.

C-Span, America’s main public service broadcaster (and a phenomenal aid to democracy and transparency in the US) broadcasts this half hour live to an American audience; it is one of its most popular shows. We can all feel rigid with pride thinking of Americans, living in a country racked with infantile consensus politics, sitting in their living rooms thinking, ‘Why don’t we have this?’ Image the chimp-president George W Bush subjected to this treatment for eight years. (Footnote: Proposals for an American Question Time, on the British model,  have been suggested since the days of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, it was a little commented upon electoral pledge of John McCain, though sadly far outweighed by his choice of an illiterate demagogue for running mate).

PMQs, and the adversarial nature of Parliamentary proceedings in general, have their basis in a very British form of public culture, which has been termed a ‘boisterous democracy’. We argue in pubs, argue in our courts, argue in the street. We gravitate towards writers who don’t give a shit and have a sturdy tradition of ‘English Troublemakers’,  as A.J.P Taylor called them, who stand at the back and shout ‘Shame! Rubbish!’ at elected heads of state. Let the yanks make soothing noises about ‘bi-partisanship’, their Congress is boring.

Nigel Farage (a degenerate righty, I know) exported a bit of this spirit when he confronted our European overlord, Herman van Rompuy, in the EU Parliament. I’d encourage you to watch the short video below, and feel proud:

Nigel Farage harangues EU President Herman van Rompuy

Look how the Dutch-speakers boo and hiss!

Here’s one of the great parliamentary performances of the late Michael Foot, berating the then Industry Secretary Keith Joseph:

Michael Foot\’s Magician

This tells you all you need to know: in British political culture, it is quite acceptable for an MP to publicly humiliate a member of Her Majesty’s Government, providing the flowery language is kept to and some wit is on display.

Here’s the paragraph about how this wonderful thing is under threat: John Bercow – a lurid misogynist as it happens – has stated that the ‘abusive’ nature of PMQs needs revising. From the BBC website:

‘Mr Bercow…suggested the prime minister and opposition leaders of the day agree a “common understanding of behaviour” among their MPS, enforced by the whips, which would allow the Speaker to operate “the parliamentary equivalent of yellow and red cards…if that were to prove absolutely necessary” [My emphasis]‘

Never mind the fact that members can already be suspended for failing to keep to protocol; never mind the fact that this would constitute a great increase in power for the already over-powerful whips; and never mind the fact that the drama of PMQs  - in particular watching two grown men insult each other in fancy language – is its main appeal. David Cameron talked about ending the ‘Punch and Judy politics’ of Westminster: you know what a slimy bastard this man is when he references one quintessentially English institution to attack another. Swine.

A collection has been set up by Old Holborn to help Hogan who is jail for non-payment of a huge fine. To donate click here.

Pub landlord Nick Hogan has been jailed  for 6 months over the smoking ban. Basically he was lumped with costs and fines totalling more than 10k after several breaches – including a mass smoke in on the day the ban came in. After declaring himself unable to meet the £500  month payments he has been jailed. As somebody who has stood up and paid the price he deserves the support of all of us who oppose the smoking ban (if you don’t oppose it yet read on). I am about to donate to the fund set up by old holborn  and suggest you do to. (yes he’s a righty but he’s correct on this!)

Anna Racoon explains more:

“Nick was actually jailed for non-payment of the fine originally imposed for a ‘mass smoke-in’ on the day the ban came into force in 2007 in his pub, the ‘Swan and Barristers’ in Bolton. He no longer has that pub. He was fined again when council inspectors walked into his present pub and discovered a group of customers smoking – Nick wasn’t even on the premises.

His wife, Denise, is now managing their present pub in Chorley  herself.  Their trade is so low that they don’t even bother to open the downstairs bar. Nick is bankrupt, and had gone to court intending to argue that he could not afford the £500 a month payments demanded by the council towards their £10,000 bill for prosecuting him. He has already paid off £1,600. The court gave him a six month sentence instead, and he is currently in Forest Bank prison in Pendlebury, unable to help to earn the money which would ensure his release.

Denise has not even been able to speak to him since he was sentenced. She has merely been told to phone the prison on Monday to enquire when she might see him. She is confused, frightened, and feeling very lonely.

Denise has just said to me ‘all the people who disagree with the ban – where are they now? – and my Nick is in prison’. Quite.

If all the people who disagree with the no-smoking ban contributed a few coppers, then Nick would be released. If you can’t afford £1, then at least drop Nick a line and let him know he is not forgotten – not surprisingly, he is feeling very depressed.

Denise has no idea how to use the Internet, she has no idea how many of us are against the no-smoking ban. Let’s show her.

£1 each – just 10,000 of you – let’s see if the blogosphere can do more than merely rant in unison. Once the amount received totals the outstanding fine, they have to release Nick.”

I have already expressed my opposition to the smoking ban here and here.  Quite simply thisis about pluralism, and the defence of civil society. Public houses are not public services. They are not town halls. They are places of entertainment which people choose, or choose not, to attend. They need not be acceptable or desirable places for everybody.  They are places where groups of men and women voluntarily associate for the purposes of leisure. As such  it is widely accepted that pubs and clubs may simply refuse you entry. They can simply say no, you’re not our kind of guy (or in my case “no you look like you are coming in to keep warm”). Yet if they say that you can come in, but only on condition that you accept certain rather minor risks (passive smoking) then, according to the government, your rights are being  trampled on. Bollocks.

One man has stood up for pluralism and choice in the social sphere and has been beaten with a very big stick for doing so. The least we could do is help him out.

Homage to Hogan and Other Smoking ban Heroes

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.

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.