Labour’s war on pleasure Starmer is the enemy of Merrie England

It’s an ambivalence with deep roots in English cultural history: one that perhaps especially permeates the Labour Party since its emergence from the 19th-century trade-union movement. But in his choices since entering No. 10, Starmer has revealed that his Labour represents, almost unadulterated, one side of that debate: Fabianism, the Labour not of the industrial masses, but the London bourgeoisie. And the recent backlash against his proposed health interventions reveals that his true enemy may not be “the Right” at all, but something older and more anarchic, and which today is ironically more associated with the working class than any other: the convivial, chaotic and sometimes startlingly violent spirit of “Merrie England”.

Of course, England’s merriment had already been significantly curbed by the time the bourgeois, top-down movement for clean living and socialist government known as “Fabianism” emerged in the late Victorian era, amid George Bernard Shaw’s progressive circle. Now a Labour Party think tank, the Fabian Society formed in 1884 is still alive and well, while its project of progressive taxation, administrator-led social democracy and top-down revolution is discernible all over Labour policy in recent decades.

But the Fabian tendency most starkly in evidence today is that group’s ascetic sensibility. The Fabians emerged from a Christian socialist group, the Fellowship of New Life, whose object was “the cultivation of a perfect character in all” through simple living. Their early members included vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, teetotalers, anarchists, Tolstoyan pacifists, and other radicals. The Fabians separated from the Fellowship over the latter’s prioritisation of spiritual over temporal goals, seeking instead to engage more directly in politics. Rejecting the Marxist framing of class war, this new group sought to make socialism acceptable to the English middle classes.

To that end, they emphasised gradualism and rational policy development, proposed training a new governance class that would guide England toward socialism for the good of all, and sought to promote a vision of socialism understood as simply an extension of general niceness. In 1913, in their newly-founded magazine The New Statesman, Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb described socialism as “teaching ourselves to be gentlemen” and rolling out a “national standard of good manners”. Contra Marx, there was, the Fabians suggested, no necessary opposition between labour and capital. There didn’t have to be a class war. It was just a matter of educating everyone to be polite, as well as abstemious.

The difficulty with this, though, is that in practice such “education” in socialist niceness and self-restraint has often had to be imposed not just on Labour’s official enemies — conservatives — but also on the supposed beneficiaries of socialism: the working class themselves. For while the 19th-century labour movement represented a mobilisation of that class in its own interests, many bourgeois socialists viewed them more as an object for moral reform by their betters than as people capable of effecting positive change through their own collective agency. And this in turn has produced a longstanding worry: what if the masses are simply too short-termist to know what’s best for them?

For by the late Victorian era, social reformers had long been shaking their heads and tutting at the plebs’ leisure-time priorities. As far back as the 18th century, commentators were already denouncing the moral disaster that resulted from the transposition of English peasant entertainment into an urban, industrial setting: one that had degraded these communities’ enjoyment of festivity from the orderly chaos of convivial “Merrie England” into something more like moral squalor. One historian, writing in 1791, described how English rural people come together for festivals “from all quarters, fill the church on Sunday, and celebrate Monday with feasting, with musick, and with dancing”. By contrast, he reported, among the industrial proletariat such a gathering “never fails to produce a week, at least, of idleness, intoxication and riot”.

But perhaps you think “idleness, intoxication and riot” sounds fun. If so, you would not have been alone even in 1791; by then England had already spent two centuries racked by disagreements over the proper place of merriment. For while some modern commentators claim “Merrie England” never existed, but was invented (usually by conservatives) as a foil for everything they dislike about modernity, premodern England was indeed considerably merrier than its later iterations.

It’s true that, as historian Rebecca Jeffrey Easby argues, Victorian medievalists often constructed an ideal Middle Ages as a foil for everything they disliked about industrial modernity. These weren’t all conservatives: William Morris, for example, often evoked nostalgic visions of return to an idealised premodern communitarian life but also imagined that socialism might provide a cure for the industrial ugliness he hated.

But the England at which they glanced back really existed — after a fashion. As historian Ronald Hutton shows, England’s elaborate ritual calendar comprised a kaleidoscope of feasting, fasting, saints’ days and local traditions that began every year at Christmas and continued till the summer with events such as “wassailing” or “Hocktide”, the day shortly after Easter upon which men could capture and tie up a local woman, only to be released for a fee paid into parish funds.

Merrie England was ended by the Reformation. By the time Cromwell took the reins as Lord Protector in 1653, saints’ days had been abolished; Christmas, Easter and Whitsun had also been scrapped, and Sunday was a strict, abstemious Sabbath. All that remained in the festive calendar was the anti-Catholic innovation of Guy Fawkes’ Day.

Nostalgia for this premodern world tends to focus on its festive and communitarian qualities. But whether conservative or socialist, Victorian evocations of Merrie England tended to be somewhat sanitised. As Hutton also shows, pre-modern England also made room for darker and more riotous instincts alongside the communitarianism and faith, including barely-constrained forms of violence. For example, one popular feast-day pastime was “cockthreshing”, a game in which a live cockerel was tethered in place by one foot, while people tried to knock it over or kill it by throwing missiles. Cockfighting and badger-baiting were also popular. Still more visceral was the tradition of Shrovetide football games, which had no rules at all, and were described by Sir Thomas Elyot in 1531 as “nothing but beastly fury and extreme violence, whereof proceedeth hurt”.

Shrovetide football survives today in one location: the Royal Atherstone match, which ended in 2023 with a brutal crowd punch-up outside a betting shop. Watching the footage, I can sort of see where the Roundheads were coming from. But it also looks fun. And yet if Victorian social reformers recoiled from “fun” in this medieval English sense, this was surely due to a not wholly unreasonable feeling that Merrie England’s regular outlets for “idleness, intoxication and riot” were, under industrial conditions, impossibly socially destructive. Indeed, corresponding efforts to curb its excesses were in evidence well before the Fabian group was formed: in 1855, for example, a Parliamentary bill sought to restrict Sunday trading, and especially the sale of alcohol, in the hopes that this would encourage the lower orders to church-going and godly abstemiousness.

But Sunday was the only day off for many, and these workers resented having their leisure options curtailed. When they protested, even their reaction expressed Merrie England’s ancient tradition of violence-as-leisure: at the resulting demonstration in Hyde Park, crowds hauled a large eel out of the Serpentine and threw it at the police line, before engaging in pitched, window-smashing battle with officers. They didn’t even stop rioting after the bill was withdrawn; in the view of the Manchester Guardian, the protest had by then escaped its “original and well-meaning authors” and was now driven by “a set of ne’er-do-wells for whom there is no expostulation so suitable as a thick stick”.

And this hints in turn at the deeper subtext to complaints about Starmer’s approach to smoking and greasy food. Though few would spell this out, proposed crackdowns on smoking and junk food feel of a piece with his brusque handling of the recent riots in Southport and elsewhere. And this can only be via something unmentionable even among conservatives: the fact that for many, violence is less “the language of the unheard”, as Martin Luther King put it, than just fun.

Though ever more methodically stripped of official outlets, from the Reformation onwards, this has remained visibly the case for at least a subset of young English men. There are football hooligans, of course; but sometimes, in an echo of the Sunday trading riots, it also passes for political activism. In my Left-wing youth, for example, May Day marches usually meant an appearance by “the Wombles”, a far-Left gang that would don thick padding and bicycle helmets and pick riotously violent fights with the police, ostensibly to Left-wing ends but mostly — we all suspected — because they enjoyed it. More recent instances of the same phenomenon include “Antifa” and, we can reasonably surmise, a good many of those who smashed up their neighbourhoods over recent weeks for ostensibly political reasons.

So should our leaders go beyond keeping the peace, and try to stamp out all forms of “fun”? The last time anyone Fabian-aligned got a sniff of power they nixed the last great holdout for Merrie England’s love of seasonal riot and casual animal cruelty: fox hunting. No doubt those of more Fabian sensibility today will argue that we can and should: that street violence is not a legitimate form of “fun”, any more than animal abuse, or indeed self-destructive behaviours such as smoking or eating fried food. We must be saved from ourselves. In any case, it doesn’t really matter what any of us thinks; Labour’s majority affords them a free hand to try. Those with any residual sympathy for England’s ancient streak of anarchy must brace themselves for a very un-merry few years.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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