Forget about the riots, censorship, and the gradual transition into full-blown anarcho-tyranny. If the pub dies, England will truly lose its soul.

Let me explain. We like to drink. A lot. English culture revolves around alcohol, like electrons around a nucleus. Drinking is in our blood. There’s nothing we won’t drink to, no place we won’t pop open a beer.

Elsewhere, an angry Muslim man is suing the Saracen’s Head in Buckinghamshire for its alleged ’Islamophobic’ name and sign.

When commercial air travel became affordable to the working class, the airplane evolved into a flying bar. I once boarded the same plane as a bunch of inebriated women on a hen party to Spain. A drunken woman punching a man on an economy flight to Ibiza is something of a British rite of passage.

Drinking it in

Ours is a country steeped in history, tradition, and strong drink. Like the Irish, we can boast of many an ale-quaffing literary heavyweight. It was Chaucer who made reference to the Tabard Inn almost 700 years ago in "The Canterbury Tales." Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare drank in the George Inn just a few yards away.

The Tabard was demolished in 1873. The George still exists but only as a museum — an apt symbol for our current crisis.

A few days ago, I walked past a place I regularly used to drink. It was like seeing a ghost. A poster case housing thousands of papered-over concert flyers half an inch thick has been ripped down, leaving the exposed brickwork cracked, discolored, and casting an ominous shadow.

From a broken window, I saw that the chairs were stacked on tables, the oak bar counter was gone, and the copper foot rail had been removed from its bolts. The doors were locked, and the loud neon sign that had once welcomed me in like an old friend now sat silently on the ground, gathering dirt.

Poignant pints

Standing there, aghast, my heart sank, and I felt the pangs of nostalgia. You see, It was more than just a pub. It was a repository of memories. Imagine if bricks could tell stories: a place that my friend took me after my first break up. As a young man, it was where I came to know my father as he slipped a pint across the table without saying anything. On late nights, it was where co-workers danced while the jukebox played the Pogues and everyone sang along.

I remember the beer garden where I chatted up a future girlfriend, asking her for a light, and that dimly lit back room where I jumped off a speaker stack into the sticky, beer-soaked floor at my first ever live gig. It’s where my best friend shared his heart-wrenching news that he only had a few weeks left and the place where locals came together to raise a glass in his memory when he was gone.

What ales us

We are losing an average of one pub per day. Since 2020, more than 2,000 have shut their doors for good. Economic factors have played a big part in the decline of the industry. Escalating business rates, VAT, and alcohol duties are causing many pubs to close — one-third of the cost of a pint now goes toward taxes. Landlords have been forced to increase prices due to the escalating expenses. It's predicted that the price of a pint could double in less than a decade. In some parts of London, it has reached 10 pounds. As a result, many people now buy alcohol from the off license (liquor store) and drink it at home.

The culture wars have also played a part. Pubs with names like the Black Bitch, the Black Boy, and the Blacks Head have all been changed due to racial identitarians spouting nonsense about systemic/structural/institutional racism.

Head case

Elsewhere, an angry Muslim man is suing the Saracen’s Head in Buckinghamshire for its alleged "Islamophobic" name and sign. Every time Khalid Baqa walks past the pub in Amersham, he is "shocked and deeply offended" seeing the name Saracen — the name for Arabs and Muslims in the Middle Ages. The 61-year-old Baqa claims that the pub sign "incites violence" and glorifies "decapitating/beheading Muslims." He wants the landlord to pay him £1,800 for the offense. If successful, he plans to target the other 30 British pubs with the same name.

The plaintiff turns out to be a convicted terrorist. In 2018, he was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison for creating and distributing jihadi propaganda. No need to worry; in an interview with the Sun newspaper, he claims to have "stopped all the terrorism stuff now."

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Blaze Media Illustration

Ours to save

Defending our culture goes far beyond stopping a mad Muslim pensioner from declaring jihad on a 500-year-old bar. We must fight a true culture war. In order to save pubs, taxes must be cut, grants and subsidies allocated to community-owned pubs, and new planning laws enacted to prevent developers from tearing down historic buildings such as pubs and churches, which serve as important social hubs.

Pubs are where the English laugh, cry, and argue. They bring people together. As a result, they act as an antidote to loneliness and isolation, two of the most insidious and pervasive threats in our time. As I sat in my new local pub, I noticed a young woman and her father befriending an elderly man. Three strangers, two generations bonded over fries and Guinness. That’s what community means. And we are losing it.