The pint is served roughly. It spills as it lands on the bar, sending a little eddy of suds down the glass, into the lattice of branded rubber matting, a place where neither scrubbing brushes nor a desperate human tongue can penetrate. Typical. My 5p Reform windfall, gone in the clumsy flick of a wrist. I guard the pint carefully as I weave a perilous path to my table, quietly satisfied at pushing another struggling family closer to penury.
Still, what is the pub if not a place for letting loose and sidestepping the usual laws of economics? It is surely no accident that Nigel Farage chose a Westminster boozer to launch his latest crime against mathematics last week, promising a £3bn tax relief for the hospitality sector – equivalent to 5p off a pint – to be paid for by the reinstatement of the two-child benefit cap.
Never mind that HMRC’s own estimates blow a hole in his sums, assessing his buffet of inducements at about £10bn more than budgeted. Within these four wood-panelled walls, anything goes. The questions will be softball and the banter will be legendary. No mate, no no mate, hear me out. You know how Labour took 450,000 children out of poverty? What if we put them back in … and spent the money on pints for the lads instead?
But, of course, attention to fiscal detail has never really been part of Reform UK’s personal brand. The optics are the point here, and while it was very sweet of the Labour press office to put out a policy-based rebuttal – extension of World Cup opening hours, something called the hospitality support fund – as with most pub debates this is not really an argument that can be won with facts and figures. A more urgent and pertinent question is why the hard right has increasingly chosen this as its battleground, why this most public of spaces is becoming a sphere of political contention.
Like many former public schoolboys, Farage loves to romanticise the pub as a sort of keyboard shortcut to working-class authenticity. One of his early GB News segments was called Talking Pints, where Farage and a guest would sit in a Paddington studio against an electronic backdrop of a traditional English pub, sipping from a beer placed in front of them by a member of the production staff and talking about, I dunno, probably “woke”.
The same aesthetic survives today on Talk’s Sunday-afternoon show Grumpy Old Men, a show I swear was commissioned for the sole purpose of generating standup material for Stewart Lee. In it, three men sit in a similar studio in front of a similar pub backdrop and moan about topics ranging from Ulez to veganism to people who sneeze, with a rage so effortless and pure that you could almost swear they were producing it on demand for money.
And so when the likes of Farage talk about saving the great British pub, when Reform’s Lee Anderson says “every pub is a parliament”, they are really evoking a very specific image: “a stereotype of pubs as spaces for older white men to sit and drink,” as the Green MP Siân Berry puts it. A kind of pub cosplay, the safety and impunity of an imagined past, a refuge where old white lads can say whatever they like without ever being challenged.
Naturally this is a place shorn of society’s inconveniences: Muslims, families, the young people increasingly forsaking the pub for sobriety, digital socialising and cheaper supermarket drinking. Occasionally Grumpy Old Men will invite a woman on to the panel, who will be deemed an “honorary bloke” and have a moustache drawn on her.
And the reason that this is fertile ground for the right is that for a broad swathe of society, the pub is objectively a brilliant invention. You love the pub. I love the pub. Indeed, I am typing these very words from a pub (The Sun of Camberwell). About 78% of these columns are written in the pub, and particularly attentive readers will invariably be able to spot the bit when the fourth pint begins to kick in and the hard details begin to blur into unfocused polemic, run-on sentences, made-up numbers.
But the danger arises when we confuse one particular vision of the pub, one demographic, for the whole experience. The real beauty of the great British pub is its sheer versatility, the way the setting moulds around its people, the ability to choose your own adventure: desi pub, country pub, chain pub, gastropub, darts pub, gay pub, old man pub, gay old man pub, the pub with the trans pride flag hanging behind the bar, the pub with £20 roasts and a dog bowl in the corner, the pub that smells of hair where the pool table can be unlocked with a single well-placed hair clip.
And while pubs are closing up and down the country – about one a day across 2024 and 2025 – arguably as big a danger is the increasing homogeneity of the pubs that remain: devoured by the big chains, caught in a deadly pincer movement of societal change, institutional neglect and hostile licensing regulations. It is a handy fiction to imagine that all this can be fixed through tax tweaks alone, particularly from a party in thrall to neoliberal economics and super-rich donors, being cheered on by the chair of Wetherspoons and the chief executive of Fuller’s.
This is, in short, a battle that can still be won. Perhaps not by Labour, with its soiled reputation and talent for unintelligible jargon, but by those willing to fight for the simple malleable joy of the pub in all its forms. To reject the ersatz fantasy economics of Reform and its backers, a vision of the pub rooted in a past that never existed. Because – and every seasoned drinker knows this instinctively – every pub also has its crashing bores.
