Not content with pubs being placed under further financial strain—and their workers being put in harm’s way—by plans to ban smoking in smoking areas, Britain’s Labour government is now weighing up how to make pubs call time early.
That is according to The Daily Telegraph, which has outlined new “nanny state” plans from Labour to cut down on harmful drinking.
Already, 50 pubs are closing in Britain every month. Reform UK leader, and regular pub-goer Nigel Farage warned that what he describes as “Labour’s war on landlords will finish off the rest if Starmer isn’t stopped.”
Early closing would, if implemented, also have an appalling impact on working musicians, whose performances in local pubs are already hindered by the fact these over-regulated establishments are unable, given the market, to fork out much to pay for punter-attracting performances.
While a government spokesman described the newspaper’s report that pubs could be forced to close early as “categorically untrue,” the past two weeks of scandals and double standards might suggest that this assurance is worth very little.
Labour public health minister Andrew Gwynne said that the state of Britain’s health is “morally reprehensible,” and that “bluntly there isn’t enough money” for the health service to cope without clamping down on some behaviours, such as excessive drinking.
Gwynne told this week’s Labour conference, at which Prime Minister Starmer announced a law giving investigators access to personal bank accounts, that “these are discussions that we have got to have—even if it’s just about tightening up on some of the hours of operation [for pubs]; particularly where there are concerns that people are drinking too much.”
The proposals have prompted Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick to ask: “Why does Starmer hate pubs?”
Clearly, Labour’s insistence that it is “not the fun police” has fallen on deaf ears. Starmer’s distant predecessor Tony Blair promised to relax Britain’s First World War-era licensing laws, leading to a European-style café society, but still managed to harm live music and the pub trade in the process. In contrast, Downing Street’s present resident appears to view pubs solely as a public health problem to be legislated against.
There have also been efforts this week to do away with the pint, truly a mainstay of British culture. A piece in The Guardian, no less, pointed to a study suggesting that the two-thirds measure could boost English health. (Rival suggestions for a European-style litre of beer are sadly thin on the ground.) One Dr. Burke then wrote to the newspaper hailing “an opportunity to move the sale of beer into the 21st century,” prompting liberty campaigner Christopher Snowdon to jibe: “However dull and pointless your life seems, at least you are not [like Dr. Burke] the chair of the UK Metric Association.”