Real postliberalism starts in pubs

The state cannot be the source of community attachments and affection

This article was first published in The Critic in late January. All articles published elsewhere are published free here; but for paywalled articles & postscripts, subscribe below.

Two years ago, in one of my first pieces for these most august pages, I wrote about pubs.

In particular I wrote about The Old Horn in Spennithorne — a tiny village in lower Wensleydale that had banded together after a planning application was submitted to turn the pub into two houses.

Determined to prevent this, local residents raised £180,000 and match funding from the Community Ownership Fund, securing the pub under community ownership. Volunteers undertook extensive refurbishment work, and the pub triumphantly reopened to the public in May last year.

Since that article, the community group behind the pub has been awarded CAMRA’s Pub Saving Award 2024, which lauds successful efforts to save pubs from being demolished or repurposed.

But the Old Horn is not the first community pub in my division — nor the first to win an award.

In nearby (by Dales standards) Hunton, The Countryman’s Inn has won the North West Yorkshire Branch CAMRA Pub of the Year two years running, praised as “a thriving and very welcoming village pub at the centre of its community”.

Their path was much the same as Spennithorne’s; in 2022, a community pub society was formed as the first step toward purchasing the pub. They, too, successfully completed the acquisition with the support of a grant from the Community Ownership Fund, this time of £230,000.

These two pubs are worthy of note beyond their awards; on a recent visit to the Dales with two other Critic contributors, one noted that these pubs were “actually existing postliberalism”.

That — as offhand comments sometimes do — bore the truth to light.

Both pubs are great examples of what postliberalism should celebrate — namely, the restoration of the bonds of community through self-governing voluntary associations and mutual groups. Here, as I wrote before:

A self-organised association, based on the principle of mutual dependency, works to improve community attachment and affection by taking on the rights and responsibilities of protecting its own assets, with the government stepping in to enable it to protect its common life from the ravages of a market that measures the value of vital community assets like pubs in solely economic terms.

And certainly, those behind the ventures understand that drinking together beats bowling alone. Speaking to a local paper, Leigh Carmichael, secretary of the Old Horn Community Pub Society, said: “It really has been a community effort, and the rewards will be a place to socialise, eat, drink and have a laugh with mates, friends and family.” Chris Heap, vice-chair of the Countryman’s Community Pub Society, told another local newspaper that “people are using the pub because for many of them they have a real stake in it and want it to succeed.”

But a large part of the reason these pubs have been so successful underlines a tension in postliberalism; for the constant talk of restoring the bonds of communities what postliberalism has meant in practice, so far, is more tax, bigger government and the continued unravelling of Britain’s social fabric. That’s because postliberal practitioners have been largely unable to come up with an idea of rights or responsibilities beyond those which are arbitrated by the state — i.e. by central government provision and taxation. In the case of these two pubs, however, the role the state played was fairly minimal.

In my role as councillor, the closest level of elected office to these pubs, my role has been a supporting one. In the case of the Old Horn, I did much work to ensure they obtained the Asset of Community value status needed to halt the planning application. I wrote in support of their grants; I called upon our local MP, backbencher Rishi Sunak, to do the same (for some mysterious reason, his name carries more weight than mine). In the case of the Countryman’s, I lobbied the then-Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to ensure the funds were released in time. I have provided funds for much-needed improvements like disabled access, electrical wiring and fencing (they even offered to name their washing room after me).

But on none of these issues did the Office of Tom Jones take the lead.

Had I even attempted to take a self-aggrandising central role, these pubs would have been markedly less successful than they have been. That is because, as I have written elsewhere in these most august pages:

The fundamental issue at the heart of any attempt to restore social cohesion with central government playing the leading role, however, is that it runs up against the conservative understanding of community. Burke was right; it is the little platoon we belong to first, not the big brigade, and government is the biggest brigade of all.

Government does, undoubtedly, have a role to play in this rebuilding; the finances necessary could not have been provided without it, the planning system would have been markedly harder to navigate without “a man on the inside”. But this is state backing, rather than delivery, and backing that relies on a groundswell of energetic, organic community that requires people to stand up for themselves and take a real civic pride in where they live, what their community looks like and, of course, in the improvement of their common life.

Too often, postliberal practitioners revert to the simple answer of seeing every social issue as evidence for a government programme. Much of this is down to the fact British postliberalism tends is, as Gladden Pappin writes, to be “a left-wing phenomenon, couching its goals in the terms of Christian socialism.”

The problem with this strain of thought is that Burke was right — it is the little platoon we belong to first, not the big brigade. What postliberalism needs is a strain of Burkeanism, which recognises the need for genuine community, for bonds of belonging entirely outside the purview of the state, and for ‘responsibilities’ defined outside of the tax take.

For most of its existence, postliberalism has been an ideology of academics — a political position that has spent more time with its head in the clouds than its feet in the mud. What might a postliberal policy on pubs look like? The welcoming alehouse is the living room of Deep England, yet to the best of my knowledge only one noted postliberal has ever thought about it. His answer, tellingly, is not some top-down central government initiative; it is simply to equalise the effective rates of tax paid by supermarkets and pubs when selling alcohol.

A right-wing policy? A left-wing policy? Who cares? What begins as failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency. Effective postliberalism, if it to ever exist, will owe more to cutting tax than consulting stakeholders.