In the great British tradition of turning national crises into opportunities for self-parody, one might have expected our politicians to confine their genius to matters of trade deficits or the weather. Not so Ed Miliband. The man who once led the Labour Party with the doomed charisma of a man attempting to fly a paper aeroplane in a hurricane has now, as Energy Secretary, achieved something truly immortal: he has proposed that the nation’s pubs turn off their beer fridges. Warm pints, he assures us, will save each establishment some two thousand pounds a year, a sum apparently sufficient to offset the £169 million the hospitality sector is bleeding thanks to those mysterious “bill surges” that no one in government seems willing to name aloud. One can only admire the precision. Not content with merely fiddling while Rome burns, Miliband has decided to warm the beer while the customers freeze.
The proposal, unveiled with all the solemnity of a papal bull via something called a “hospitality energy tool” (a phrase that sounds like the title of a rejected Star Trek device), rests on the heroic example of a Bromley pub that allegedly slashed its electricity use by 26 per cent. Twenty-six per cent! One pictures the landlord there now, basking in the glow of his own martyrdom, pouring tepid lagers to grateful punters who have decided that, after all, the authentic British experience was always meant to resemble the contents of a horse trough left out in the August sun. “Think of the savings,” Miliband intones from whatever think-tank bunker he currently inhabits, “and the profit from thousands of pints.” Profit from thousands of pints. The sentence has the ring of a man who has never actually ordered a pint in his life, let alone watched a customer recoil from one as though it had just confessed to voting Conservative.
The British pub is not merely a place of refreshment; it is a secular cathedral where the temperature of the beer functions as a sacrament. Warm beer is not an energy-efficiency measure; it is a declaration of war on civilisation itself. For centuries we have prided ourselves on the exquisite chill of a properly kept lager, the crisp bite of a cider served at the temperature God intended, Guinness cold enough to make the teeth sing, yet not so frigid as to anaesthetise the palate. Miliband’s suggestion is the equivalent of telling the French to serve their wine at room temperature (which, come to think of it, they already do, but that is hardly the point). It is the gastronomic equivalent of suggesting that the Queen’s Christmas broadcast would be improved if delivered in tracksuit bottoms. One almost expects him next to recommend that fish and chips be served without salt and vinegar, on the grounds that condiments are too energy-intensive.
The mind reels at the sheer imaginative poverty. Here is a man who, in his previous incarnation as Opposition leader, once brandished a banana on live television to illustrate the cost of living. A banana. Now, elevated to the cabinet, he has graduated from fruit to refrigeration. The trajectory is almost Shakespearean: from comic relief to tragic farce in a single career. One wonders what private griefs led him to this pass. Was there, in the Miliband household, a childhood fridge that refused to chill? Did young Ed once discover his milk had gone off and vow, there and then, eternal vengeance upon all cooling devices? Or is it simpler? Is this merely the latest chapter in the long Labour saga of believing that the British people can be improved by making them slightly more uncomfortable? First they came for the boilers; now they come for the beer. Tomorrow, presumably, the chip-shop fryers.
The economic case is, of course, watertight—provided one lives in the parallel universe where energy bills are solved by minor acts of self-harm. Two thousand pounds a year per pub. Splendid. That will certainly compensate for the fact that customers, faced with a pint that tastes like it has been strained through a warm sock, will simply stop coming. The Bromley pioneer may have saved 26 per cent on electricity, but one suspects the loss in custom will be closer to 100 per cent once word gets round that the place now specialises in “ambient-temperature ales.” Miliband’s own department, one notes, has presided over energy prices that have climbed faster than a Lib Dem leadership candidate after a leadership contest. Yet rather than address the root causes—those pesky global markets, the green levies, the intermittent wind turbines that seem to generate more ministerial hot air than actual electricity—he offers the hospitality industry the modern equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s advice: if they have no cold beer, let them drink warm.
The satire writes itself, yet Miliband appears determined to live it. One imagines him in his ministerial office, surrounded by advisers who have never set foot in a pub that wasn’t hosting a focus group on “levelling up.” “Ed,” one can hear them cooing, “the data from Bromley is transformative. Think of the carbon savings. Think of the optics—warm beer, warm hearts, warm planet.” The man nods sagely, oblivious to the fact that the only optics involved will be those of disgruntled regulars staring into their glasses as though searching for the lost dignity of the British working man. Somewhere in the background, a ghostly voice—perhaps that of George Orwell, perhaps that of the late, great landlord of the Moon Under Water—murmurs: “This is not what we meant by democratic socialism.”
Nor is this merely a matter of taste. It is, in the grandest sense, a betrayal of the national character. The British have endured blitzes, strikes, and the paraleiptic warbling of Ed Sheeran, yet we have always drawn the line at warm beer. It is the one immutable law, the final redoubt of sanity in a world gone mad with net-zero targets and heat-pump subsidies. Miliband, with the serene confidence of a man who has never had to explain himself to a hungover builder on a Friday night, proposes to breach that redoubt with all the subtlety of a battering ram made of recycled tofu. The pubs will comply, of course. They always do. They will disable their fridges, post little laminated signs explaining the patriotic necessity of tepid lager, and watch their profits evaporate faster than the condensation that used to form on a properly chilled glass. And Miliband will move on to the next bright idea—perhaps suggesting that central heating be replaced by communal singing, or that electric cars be powered by the sheer willpower of vegan activists.
One is reminded, inevitably, of those other great political visionaries who believed they could remake human nature with a few well-placed decrees. Robespierre had his Committee of Public Safety; Miliband has his hospitality energy tool. The guillotine was at least honest about its intentions. This, by contrast, is death by a thousand lukewarm sips. The man who once promised to save the planet now saves pennies by sacrificing the pint. It would be tragic if it were not so perfectly, hilariously, British. In the end, history will not remember Miliband for his green credentials or his leadership contests. It will remember him as the Energy Secretary who tried to warm the beer. And the nation, raising its glasses—now sadly at room temperature—will toast him with the only words that truly fit: “Cheers, Ed. You’ve done it again.”