Banning pub banter....seriously?
At this point Britons are under no obligation to obey the law or respect our institutions
For those Brits now basking in the after glow of the reassertion of biological reality, don’t assume that this will herald a rebirth of common sense among the political class. Not content with legislating heavier sentences for white people, ‘two tier Keir’ is trying to ban pub banter.
They really do.
This is tantamount to banning pub culture. Banter IS pub culture. The whole point of putting the world to rights over a couple of pints (or eight), is that people can argue, get stuff of their chest, say the unsayable, think through the unthinkable…..very occasionally have a punch-up and then kiss and make-up before the following Friday. Pubs are why Britain has never had a violent revolution since the civil war. Pubs undergird the shared culture and the common law. They always have done. And now the expert class want to destroy all of this: an end to common law; an end to informal forms of association; an end to parishes, to Easter and to Christmas; an end to football; an end to New Year’s eve; an end to the Maypole; — and an end to literate yeomen and women arguing the toss, for the sake of it, testing ideas, following arguments to their absurd conclusions…and taking the piss out of each other and out of their supposed betters.
A prayer
Please God, please please please God… let the bloated bureaucratic egos of our Nanny-overlords swell up such that they go the whole hog and try to abolish the ribald, filthy, offensive sing-song banter and chanting of English football bans. For those not acquainted with the art, this tradition is as English as the more refined banter that one might associated with a pub like the Inkling’s Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, and just as essential to the psychic landscape of Middle Earth. For a selection — see here.
Please God, not content with housing male rapists with female prisoners, let the new frontier of Swiftian absurdity for the Nicola Sturgeons and Kier Starmers of this world, be to wash out the mouthes of the verbal hooligans at Liverpool’s Kop end.
And please God, please after that — make it stop.
Your takedown of performative outrage culture (disguised as ‘pub banter’ policing) is lethally precise. The way you expose how moral panic masquerades as progress, while actual dialogue withers, should be required reading for every armchair activist. A much-needed defense of humor’s role in keeping civil society actually civil.