SEAN WALSH

AS Niall McCrae reported in these pages last week the government has used its huge majority in the House of Commons to pass the so-called ‘banter ban’. Clause 18 of the Employment Rights Bill would amend the Equality Act to force employers to ‘take all reasonable steps’ to protect their staff from ‘harassment’ by ‘third parties’. It will as Lord (Toby) Young pointed out elsewhere open a new front in the state’s war against pubs. We should not be surprised at this escalation. The puritans are in charge and these people are predatory when it comes to the enjoyment of others. For them, your pleasures are prime candidates for harassment-by-statute.

Frustrated by the determination of the pub industry to struggle on, the Prime Minister (a man who claims not to dream at night) has chosen to repurpose any hostelries which survive his purge by turning them into safe spaces for the easily offended.

In a predictable reversion to form, the government is trying to gatecrash what’s left of our private lives via the usual excuse of ‘safeguarding’. It calculates that within the to-and-fro of pub conversation innocent pub employees, non-combatants if you like, might get hit by stray fragments of offence, with all the collateral psychological harms which tend to befall those least capable of just muddling through.

Obviously even the remote chance of such tragedies demands urgent state expansion (what doesn’t?), including the recruitment of those lockdown-trained, evergreen snitches and the forced conscription of bar managers into Labour’s morality police.

There are some truths which are inexpressible in the language favoured by the nannying classes. One of these affirms the salvific function of the giving and receiving of offence. In normal adult circles this is called ‘banter’. There is a maxim which goes back as far as Aristotle: if what I say happens to offend you, let’s at least be open to the possibility that’s your fault. A moral education, he claims, involves the cultivation of proper habits of both action and feeling. The best cure for an offence might be to live in it, and not to avoid it.

The ‘safeguarding’ routine should no longer fool anyone. Autocratic governments – and this one is exemplary in that sense – are jealous when it comes to our leisure time, and worry that we might use it to cultivate affection for things which lie outside its control.

British pub culture, when left to itself, venerates history, finds wisdom in tradition, civilises drinking, offers shelter to the misfit and welcomes the stranger. Our current rulers casually and ostentatiously rewrite history, deride tradition, find value in homogeneity and exploit our instinct for hospitality by inserting themselves into every situation.

In pubs the eccentric, the dull, the insane, the bawdy, the uptight, the good, the bad, the ugly can gather in genuinely egalitarian open table fellowship. The rituals and customs of drinking in places set aside for conviviality add to social capital and when left alone pubs and the horrific, oikish stuff that happens in them will add value to the common good.

At the very least the roundheads could acknowledge that landlords were early evangelists when it comes to the new theology of diversity, equity and inclusion. The contemporary speakeasy welcomes people of all opinions and none and, within reason, lets anyone in. And while, except in perhaps Liverpool or Brighton, it is rare to find yourself hanging out in a dive as lively and boisterous as that bar in Star Wars, pubs have been ticking the ‘inclusion’ box since way before the ascent of woke tyranny.

This Prime Minister (who can’t name a favourite book) has an almost Pharisaical attachment to law. For him there is no aspect of life, no human foible, which cannot be improved by the introduction of an Act or the implementation of an exciting statutory instrument.

But human association has a coarseness and texture which cannot be softened by legal fiat. Nor should we wish it to be. The small print of human life is not written in legalese.

It is true that the Common Law speaks wisely of the human condition, but this is because it serves as a record of resolved disputes, sometimes bizarre in origin and usually all too relatable in their detail. This is not the version of law – internationalist, deracinated, abstract – which codes the algorithms implemented by the hardware of the Starmer brain.

In other words, if the Prime Minister (who refuses to name his number one film) is reaching for the blunt instrument of legislation to neutralise the unavoidable vulgarities of free association, he will soon hit the obstacle placed before killjoys throughout the ages: the glorious imperfectability of normal people.

The British pub in its quirkiness meets a need in the human heart by offering the consolations that come with group membership. Its survival affirms a principle familiar from Christian social teaching – that leisure is a serious business, at least as important as work.

What the government advertises as ‘safety’ is nearly always in truth dangerous conformity. Pubs are fine as they are. The only thing they need saving from are the unnecessary intrusions of this joyless government. The British have a depressing tendency to excuse their oppressors, and when shown a legal straitjacket will too often offer to strap themselves in. They need to take some time out, and go for a pint.

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This article (Of course there should be disagreement in pubs: that’s what they’re for) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Sean Walsh