U.K. Nanny State Considers Targeting Pubs

Britons love what they often call “our NHS,” the U.K.’s single-payer universal health-care system. But do they love it more than their pubs? We may soon find out. Andrew Gynne, the U.K.’s public-health minister, recently said that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government was considering restricting the operation of bars and pubs to improve health and social outcomes. Per the Telegraph:

Pubs could be forced to close their doors early under “nanny state” measures to target harmful drinking.

In a move to roll back the “Continental cafe-style of drinking culture” introduced by Sir Tony Blair, Andrew Gwynne, the public health minister, said the Government was considering “tightening up the hours of operation” of bars and pubs.

Mr Gwynne said the idea was being examined by ministers as part of efforts to improve health and tackle anti-social behaviour.

It’s part of the same public-health effort that led the Labour government to introduce voluntary (for now) health checks at workplaces in August, about which I wrote earlier this month. And like that effort, public-health bureaucrats are justifying it by casting individual behavior as, in effect, another number on a spreadsheet:

Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, has told ministers that if current trends continue, 60 per cent of the NHS budget will eventually be spent on diseases that could have been prevented. The current figure is 40 per cent.

He said the state of Britain’s poor health was “morally reprehensible” and that “bluntly there isn’t enough money” for the NHS to cope with rising demand without such actions.

This rationale is creepy, but unsurprising. When the state becomes the dominant force in health care, all health-care decisions become political. “Only the state’s own sufferance precludes its further intervention; the principle of personal independence is already lost,” as I put it earlier this month. And this kind of nanny-statism becomes even easier to maintain when the government can cite a genuine problem: in this case, a rise in alcohol-related deaths by one-third since 2019.

Perversely, the U.K. government’s strict Covid-19 lockdowns, which (as elsewhere) exacerbated social pathologies by isolating individuals from one another and from civil society, drove this very trend. Undaunted — indeed, emboldened — on the public-health front by the interventionist precedent its ultimately counterproductive Covid restrictions nonetheless set, the government now thinks it can solve the very problem government policies helped create.

Popular outcry may yet kill this nascent proposal. But there are other steps to escape this nanny-state trap. One, so anathema to the U.K. public that health secretary Wes Streeting is wielding it as a kind of threat to keep the populace in line, is for the health-care system to become more private. The other is for those in the U.K. to exercise restraint and moderation such that the state cannot rationalize attempting to impose them, or can only do so on spurious and more easily contested grounds.

That doesn’t mean abstaining from alcohol, obviously. But there’s nothing wrong — and in fact a good deal right — with drinking responsibly. “The best way to challenge the nanny state is to show that it is not needed,” as I wrote. Absent serious progress on either of these fronts, not just drinkers but everyone in the U.K. will be free only to the extent the nannies allow it — which is to say, not at all.