The War on Pubs

The Guardian this morning reports on the perceived "terminal decline" in the affairs of pubs in the UK. Following the body blow of the smoking ban, Britain's once-great pub culture is emptying out, pubs closing down, and people increasingly taking advantage of McTesco's cheap booze to get bladdered at home, where at least it's still legal (for the moment) to light up.

Manuscripts Don't Burn does not believe any of this is accidental. On the contrary, the "class war", to employ a traditional, lovely old phrase of yore, is alive and well and currently hammering down Those Dreadful Oiks and keeping them in their place - hard at work during daylight hours, and locked up tight when it's dark. They've had it far too good, sergeant-major, now it's time to set things right again.

The truth is, the British establishment clearly needs the Great Unwashed to work harder and harder and to get paid less and less, if it's going to continue its plan of redistributing wealth back to the hyper-wealthy and reverse the pernicious post-war egalitarianism which has threatened Our Scept'red Isle - or, as the popular version of it goes, if Britain's going to "pay its way" and "sort out the credit crisis our idle unrealistic poor people have so rashly whacked up by borrowing all that cheap and dodgy money". And we need to keep public services to a minimum - transport, policing, lighting. We've got to keep that upward flow of capital moving...

Far better to have people staggering home late from work, knackered, to spend an hour or so in isolation, watching the propaganda box with a can of something cheap and corporately-produced in their hands. What we definitely DON'T want is people getting together and talking and socialising with one another. That's terrorist talk.

We've put a lot of effort and almost 30 years into pulling British society apart at the seams, and we're not about to stop now, especially as we're so close to finishing. Pubs are for children, now - loud and expensive, full of industrially-produced alcopops and devoid of conversation. Within a year or two, we'll have the working population so knackered, impoverished and paranoid that they'll just sit and put up with the powercuts at home - they won't dare go out. It'll be like a self-imposed curfew - cheap, too! Marvellous.

Now, if we could just persuade people to put CCTV cameras in their homes... There's a challenge...