Yes, it is time to ban discourse
Hello,
Sorry, this was meant to be an update about my life as a Guinness mob boss. But unfortunately The Times has published a very stupid article and no one seems to have bothered to speak to anyone who actually works in a pub about it anyway.
The Times’ front page today featured the absolutely ludicrous headline Pubs could ‘ban patrons from talking about transgender rights’ as part of laws coming in to prevent third-party harassment at work. The theory is that customers might be having a gross, TERF-y discussion about how trans people are bad and a trans member of staff might overhear it. What, then, would the pub manager have to do? Tell them to shut up?
Well, yeah. That’s exactly what you have to tell them to do. Whether there’s any trans staff or not. When your customers are going off about gay people or immigrants or small boats or Syria or Travellers or dropping random slurs you have to walk up to the bar, get hold of their pints and tell them if they want them back they can shut the fuck up.
It is, it’s gotta be said, not entirely easy being a gay, eastern Eurovision woman running a pub in basically Kent. For some reason the only thing anyone knew about me before I took the pub over is that I’m vegan, which isn’t a particularly interesting fact about me. People thought I’d be trying to turn it into some woke, lefty …I don’t know, wine bar or something. That I’d be a pushover.
I am, as it happens, a woke lefty. A whole pinko, frankly. A lot of people who work in pubs, a not especially profitable trade with a lot of competing corporate and political interests trying to crush you at any moment, are the same.
Whatever you are, there is one quality you have to have to run a pub and that’s being in charge. At no point can anyone in the building think you are not in charge because at that stage you’ve lost control and you’re in trouble. Being a publican is basically babysitting something that you’re responsible for, from the quality of the beers to the atmosphere and sometimes that means telling your customers to shut the fuck up or barring a few of them if they won’t.
If you’re not willing to do that or think it might “create awkwardness” then you shouldn’t have a license. Since it might also “create awkwardness” if you have to, say, tell everyone it’s closing time. Or that they’re too drunk to get another beer. Tell them if they ever touch a bartender like that again they won’t have hands and post them to every pubwatch group within 20 miles.
If you let people be prejudiced in your space, you are excluding people. As I said a couple of newsletters back, the challenge is getting people in the door and if you are silly enough to think it’s better business to entertain bigots than to welcome every person you can then you’ll soon have no customers. People don’t like being around miserable old moaners drinking one pint of the cheapest beer every 90 minutes and recycling LBC talking points about People Not Like Us, people like coming into a welcoming space that’s actually pleasant to be in.
So yes, I have had to explain to my customers that there’s a whole bunch of p-words they won’t be using. That not every Asian person is “Chinese” (this really threw me, it’s like time travelling back into the 90s) and that if they want to speculate about anything LGBTQ+ they better do it somewhere not in range of my hands. That refugees deserve dignity and understanding but that actually, I don’t operate an open door policy and if you can’t talk about them as people you can get the fuck out.
It’s improved things. I already see more diverse groups of people coming into the pub. The overall conversation has been lifted because it doesn’t default to tabloid moaning. We sometimes now actually do talk about this kind of thing but in a way that allows for nuance and is about figuring stuff out, not regurgitating the worst right-wing grifters over things no one actually believes in. I’m still working on “mincer” not being an acceptable insult unless you mean this particular gay person with a meat grinder.
Because I’m not a pushover, I’m a publican and this is my house. It’s also my business and anyone making it harder for anyone to come in and get a pint is against my interests. If your pub isn’t a safe space for staff and customers then you are committing to one group of people, none of whom work for you and although Daily Mail sales might suggest they’re a rather broad one in the UK, the population density in your specific area is unlikely to be a sustainable business base.
No one has a human right to “debate” whether other people have human rights. There is no freedom of expression that’s curtailed by being a decent person. When you’re in public you can say what you like, at the risk that someone will challenge you on it. Doing that to protect and benefit your staff and customers is just the sensible thing to do and that’s what this is supposed to be all about, eh. Common sense.
And yes, I can bar people for being hateful and derogatory to other groups, whether they’re in the pub or not. It’s The Nazi Bar Problem - you let one in and days later, you’re running a nazi pub because they’ve heard they’re allowed. You start entertaining TERFs because they buy a lot of wine and there aren’t many trans people who come into your pub anyway - well then there won’t be any trans people and everyone knows you run a TERF dive. You let racists get away with it, suddenly you’re a national front pub.
Maybe some people want to run that kind of place. They can have the ones I kick out. Or, maybe, after they’ve been told to shut the fuck up, the customers can give themselves a wobble and shake off whatever nonsense they’ve been intravenously fed by Meta and tabloids and come back into the real world, where they’re surrounded by other people.
If not, the door’s there. And a bigot leaving is space for a lot more people to come in.
While I’m writing this, the other Murdoch-owned news outlet to horrify me with a pub-related story this week was Sky with this ‘What it’s like to be a publican’ piece.
Some bits of it I sort of nodded along with. Yes, the weeks are long, yes it’s a massive bummer if you have to fire a member of staff you trusted, all true. Yeah, the money’s a bit shit and especially if you work it out against the hours worked then I’m an exploitative boss of, err, myself.
Retiring at 50 as a plan was a red flag though. How’s he gonna do that when I know loads of publicans still going on well into their 60s or 70s?
Turns out this bloke wants to be the other type of landlord and has been buying up properties for rental income. So the money can’t be that bad, can it, eh? I don’t know why - well, I do, I hate rental landlords - but something feels particularly immoral about giving up the pub game to squeeze leases.
Maybe that’s all a bit pearl-clutching of me, it’s not like running a pub is a saint’s gig. I can’t see myself retiring in 11 years’ time, in any case. Not unless my Guinness mob boss career really picks up, of course.
See you later,
Hazel