There are still, despite the best efforts of Britain’s political class, rural pubs.
Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, the “nature minister” in Britain’s Labour government and the MP for Suffolk Coastal (a rural, naturally Conservative constituency, which she only narrowly won) is afraid. Speaking at an event at the Labour Party conference, she said that if Labour doesn’t “make the case for nature, for rural communities, and what we believe rural communities look like” she fears “that the next election is going to be fought on a battle line of nature and rural affairs.” That would seem unlikely, even from the vantage point of Suffolk, but there we are.
Her concern, no, fear, is that if Labour doesn’t take a position on these issues, the countryside will be co-opted:
“And there’ll be the far Right deciding and determining what that looks like. It’ll be a vision, a nostalgic vision of a Britain that never really existed.
“It’ll be that warm ale, a black Labrador by your feet in a pub that doesn’t exist, and with symbolism of fox hunting all around them. It’ll be a very far-Right nostalgic vision of Britain that we don’t want to have, [that] never really existed.”
Doesn’t exist. Never really existed? And this from a minister in a government that sees itself on the front lines of the war against “disinformation.”
Riddell-Carpenter’s remarks are, the unmistakable hint of paranoia aside, yet more evidence that the rewriting of Britain’s past (and present) is one key element in Labour’s project for the country’s future.
There are still, despite the best efforts of Britain’s political class, rural pubs. And it is quite possible that people take their dogs there with them and, that on occasion, those dogs may be black Labradors. Indeed, one of my brothers, who lives in a rural area, used to have a black Lab. Could he have taken her to the pub? And did he take her to a pub “with symbolism of fox hunting all around?” I have no idea, but one day, the commissars may be asking.
I can only assume that Harold Wilson, three-time Labour prime minister in the 1960s and 1970s, is now considered far-right-adjacent. He went to pubs (and had at least two named after him), he smoked (a pipe, mainly), and he owned Paddy, a Labrador (gold, not black, which may help him to escape condemnation). There is shocking footage proving that he took Paddy (and Mrs. Wilson) to a rural pub on at least one occasion.
Can cancellation be far away?
And here’s another suspect figure, one “George Orwell” (online censors will note that this was, suspiciously, a pseudonym), writing about his ideal pub, the Moon Under Water, a composite made up of features that he liked in pubs he had visited. Dogs don’t feature, nor do fox-hunting paraphernalia, but I suspect that Riddell-Carpenter would have found it a touch right-coded: “In winter there is generally a good fire burning in at least two of the bars.”
And as for this, well:
If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its ‘atmosphere’.
To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece — everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.
“Uncompromisingly Victorian.”
And, and: A stuffed bull’s head?
Regrettable, reactionary, problematic.
Orwell located the Moon Under Water in the London area. He explains that “the qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.”
That won’t do, not at all.