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Pubs, police and radicals: a long history of eavesdropping
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After a pandemic-dictated period of closure, pubs have this week reopened indoors in England and Wales. Some – those that sell mainly beer, with little or no food – have been shut since the first lockdown in March 2020. And some will not reopen at all.

The COVID legal requirement in force in England for periods last year, that you could only drink in a pub if you also had an ill-defined “substantial meal”, also brought into relief the extent to which many modern pubs had already been forced to rely heavily on food for their profits, given that tax is a major element of the cost of drinking.

But the debate also highlighted the persistence of older assumptions and manipulations of the contested role the pub plays in society. As the doors reopen, it is worth thinking about what kind of pub we want, in future.

Pubs are sites for informal gatherings; for social, and socially controlled, drinking. But they are also sites in which global breweries (“big beer”) and the PubCos are free to make profits (and avoid taxes on them where they can), even as the tax on beer in the UK – paid for by the ordinary drinker – is the second highest in Europe.

This past year has also heard echoes of the historic temperance-related view that if you eat, you will drink more responsibly. And of the view that pubs where drink, not food, is the focus, attract the ‘lower classes’.

And who knows what such persons get up to, discuss, plan and plot in such places?

A short history of pub surveillance

One group of people with an interest in that question is the police. For centuries, when the Left met in pubs around the world, the police were also there.

The current SpyCops hearings in London revealed – along with grim details of the police officers who used false identities to befriend, sleep with and have children with left-wing women activists – the extent to which police also infiltrated and spied on the Left by gathering information in pubs. Based on evidence from the Autumn 2020 hearings, Tom Foot of the Camden New Journal surveyed all the pubs in which radicals had met and undercover police officers had also drunk in, observing the minutiae of Left life, making notes, and passing them on to superiors. There were a considerable number of such pubs, a particular favourite being the one that is now Camden Brewdog.

And there is no reason to think the police spies are not still listening in. Which is good news for historians, perhaps, but concerning for those who have may have thought they were having private and personal conversations.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/pubs-police-and-radicals-long-history-eavesdropping/