“Merry England”, according to Wikipedia, refers to a utopian conception of English society and culture based on an idyllic pastoral way of life. It was supposed to have been prevalent in Early Modern Britain, at some point between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. The Victorians were very fond of it, writing fairytales of a bucolic, rural, and happier England.
More broadly (so the online encyclopedia continues), it connotes a putative and essential Englishness. It has nostalgic overtones – thatched cottages, the country inn, the Sunday roast, etc – and can be seen as an ideological or political construct, underwriting various conservative worldviews. It is an England we have lost, lament, and dream of finding again, however briefly.
Standing with a couple of our contributors in a pub garden in deep Yorkshire a few weeks ago, as children played, a band jammed, and the ale frothed, I thought Merry England had been found again. Call it nostalgia, call it romanticism, call it real existing post-liberalism. It was marvelous. It only became more so as my migration-sceptic mates and I made our ways back and forth to the bar.
This is the England, I contend, that Keir Starmer wants to kill. Yes, our adenoidal overlord is occasionally pictured with a pint. As a vegetarian, the roast beef of old England may not be to his liking. But the nut roast? The steady expansion of his waistline since entering Parliament suggests he knows how to indulge. Perhaps his sausage slip-up was something of a Freudian slip.
But for all his performative jollity, Starmer presides over a government enthusiastic about hobbling the one or two extravagances still allowed to the free-born Englishman. Strenuous efforts may have been made to suggest Andrew Gwynne spoke out of turn when he suggested pubs could be made to close their doors early. But it is indicative of a worrying direction of travel.
Junk food advertising banned on television before the watershed, and entirely online, in case any flash of the golden arches causes an onlooker to burger themselves to death. A crackdown on smoking, including a war on lighting up outside pub gardens, football stadiums, nightclubs, and more. ‘Health MOTs’ in workplaces, with NHS snoopers empowered to poke and prod your gut.
We know why they are doing this. Without Gordon Brown-esque largesse to increase health service supply, the Government must instead reduce demand. Reform the public, rather than the NHS. Estimates suggest smoking, obesity, and alcohol cost the health service £12.5 billion. Clamp down on the booze, fags, and chips, and more money is available to buy off the nurses.
The fiscal problem with this, of course, as our Deputy Editor, the peerless Christopher Snowden, and the tireless campaigners of Spiked have long made clear, is that making the public healthier means they live longer. If they live longer, they get old. And if they get old, they encounter all health problems that being old entails, which are already putting the NHS under unprecedented strain.
As Snowden points out, £12.5 billion is only 4.2 per cent of what we spent on healthcare last year. The Canadian dystopia legalising assisted dying might entail could do much more for balancing the books, if the Department of Health went full Logan’s Run. But that’s a much more difficult argument to make to aging voters than a performative crackdown on the fat, drunk, and cancerous.
It also runs against Starmer’s instincts. He stands in a Gladstonian tradition of the high-minded and hectoring British left. In alliance with the most zealous elements of the public health nomenklatura – Chris Whitty has got his slides out again – it represents a formidable force of prudes and poseurs revulsed by the indulgence of their fellow Britons. The temperance spirit never dies.
They aren’t wrong to think it is a good idea if the public ate well, boozed less, and didn’t smoke too many tabs. By nationalising healthcare, we nationalise responsibility. The only link between poor health and bank balances is at the input stage. The taxpayer picks up the bill for those who are unhealthy. Can ConservativeHome really oppose reducing the demand for government?
But in bullying us into leading healthier lives, the state not only infantilises us, but overreaches. It denies us of our right to make our own choices and penalises the responsible majority for controlling an irresponsible few. It is similar to the hectoring mentality behind lockdown, but it swaps any pretence of protecting the vulnerable for protecting the public finances.
Can the Conservative Party condemn it? Can we speak for Merry England, as Benjamin Disraeli once hoped to do? Alas, we don’t have a leg to stand on. Tony Blair may have banned smoking in pubs. But Boris Johnson brought about the junk food ban. Labour are only reheating Rishi Sunak’s gradual prohibition on tobacco sales, even after the Kiwis who devised it have junked it.
Yet the biggest barrier to bringing Merry England to pass in 2024 is the public themselves. The average Englishman today is not John Bull, resplendent in Union waistcoat, pint in hand, roast beef for dinner, and with an Ian Botham poster on his bedroom wall. We are a nation of petty authoritarians. Many still hanker for lockdown and wish nightclubs had never reopened.
Whatever our habits, we are more than happy to condemn those of others. Aside from the country’s one or two libertarians, few would go to the barricade for their neighbour’s right to smoke or drink – especially when they’ve been waiting seven hours in A&E. Even as 50 pubs close a month, most are happy enough that they no longer stink of fags when they pop out for a pint.
But with every restriction on our freedom, every limitation on our right to decide for ourselves, we take one step closer to not only being a health service with a country attached, but to being a pettier, more miserable, and illiberal country. The frontiers of nannying always push further forward. How long until smoking is banned entirely? Or pub closures are cheered on by ministers?
That would be an England gone. Perhaps an England as unreal, romantic, and irretrievable as the Merry England enthusiasts of the 1800s dream of. But a bit of England would still have died. What do the leadership candidates make of that? Do they think that Starmer’s proposals don’t go far enough? Or do they think our party should stand for freedom and choice, and draw a line?
With conference days away, one hopes to see the candidates in Hyatt bar, making themselves available for party members to consult them on topics such as this. One doesn’t have to defect to Reform to see that Nigel Farage’s lack of abstemiousness is part of his appeal. Our party once produced an editor of The Spectator similarly inclined. He fell off, alas. But has it done so again?
