Another target for spotters of our lost pubs

One of the ways I occupy myself when I visit somewhere unfamiliar is to look around at the buildings and try to figure out which ones used to be pubs.

When you actually look hard, they jump out at you. There are various telltale signs.

Some, which have been converted into houses, have, for example, retained the frosted glass which was meant to afford a degree of privacy for those enjoying an ale in the public house.

For others, the frontages – particularly windows and doors – scream former pub.

In rural areas many of the old pubs had porches where men who worked in the fields all day could shake off the mud and the moisture before adjourning to the hearth with tankard in hand.

Sometimes it’s as obvious as the name of the building. Britain’s urban landscape is now dotted with private homes called things like Red Lion House.

And so it is with the Red Lion at Wingham – despite a spirited campaign by villager Alex Lister and the intervention of master baker Paul Hollywood.

Last week’s Kentish Gazette reported that they had finally lost their battle to retain the pub. A planning inspector has ruled that the pub can be converted into flats. Gone forever.

Pubs are disappearing across the country for various reasons.

One is that our domestic habits have changed. From the 1950s on we have looked increasingly towards the home and what we make of it.

After the war, home appliances became fixtures of the house. By the 1970s, cooking and entertaining guests à la Abigail’s Party became popular. My parents’ kitchen in south Canterbury contains numerous cookbooks which are decades old.

The 80s saw the advent of home computers and by the 90s satellite TV and home entertainment systems began making inroads into our lives.

There are now so many reasons and ways not to leave the house, it’s no wonder pubs are dying.

The “open letter” from a handful of Canterbury academics, PHD students and union officers who share an objection to professional wind-up merchant Milo Yiannopoulos speaking at his former school is one of the weirdest documents I’ve ever read.

Explaining why Milo should not have been allowed to talk at the Langton, the letter – which runs to nearly 1,400 words – reads like the work of a thirdrate undergraduate.

A horror show of clanking jargon from the gloomy world of identity politics, it ranges from pseudo-intellectual drivel to hysterical exaggeration.

That this letter is the work of a rump of Canterbury intellectuals wholly unconnected with the grammar school is its most telling characteristic.

For on Monday the school revealed that 220 pupils had signed up – with parental consent – to hear Milo.

But the school felt pressured to cancel the talk after threats of protest and the intervention of the Department for Education’s extremism unit.

What we have instead is just the latest in a long line of assaults on free speech in this country.

More to the point, these assaults on what people can say and think always comes from the same direction – from intellectuals, from university employees and from highly educated people suckling from the public sector teat.

Driven half-insane by the fear that others should be free to challenge their prejudices, it is these people more than any others who seek to assert the power to silence dissent.

Christine Dickinson, Kent secretary of the National Union of Teachers, for example, spoke to the BBC about Milo’s visit. She said: “Anybody that encourages racism, sexism, any other form of inequalities, and is against the British value of tolerance, then I am very worried about them having access to young people.”

Such gooey overtures towards tolerance always contain the paradox that they are, in Milo Yiannopoulos has become ‘the outrageous poster boy of the fight for free speech’

fact, furiously intolerant of alternative points of view.

Moreover, words like “racism” and “sexism” – charges which Milo would deny – are bandied about so recklessly these days that they are scarcely credible as descriptions to most of those to whom they are applied.

The authors of the open letter claim that their purpose is to protect young people from the “extremely harmful effects” of Milo’s one-hour session. This claim is baseless.

More to the point, it is not borne out by the fact 220 pupils wanted to hear Milo speak and had their parents’ blessing to do so.

No. This letter and the complaint to the Department for Education was not about protecting young people, some of whom would have been legally classed as adults.

These actions were about denying a voice to a critic, someone who delights in exposing the fraud and the false promise of their ideologies.

Most of all, the intellectuals fear that soon enough we’ll

just stop listening to them, that their ideas will become obsolete and irrelevant. Where would the intellectuals be then? Relegated to the status of absurd curiosities in the footnotes of history.

As a result of the furore around Milo, I watched some of his videos. It’s clear that much of what he does is deliberately provocative. Some of it is comically inflammatory and yet a great deal of it is entirely valid.

His crime, in the Canterbury intellectuals’ eyes, is his capacity to fire penetrating salvos – often encased in dark humour – into the inflexible, leftist dogmas of the day.

This, the intellectuals find abhorrent. Indeed the letter’s authors wail that Milo’s “online audience is expanding at an alarming rate”. This suggests he is doing something right.

People – especially the brilliant young minds at the Boys’ Langton – aren’t brainless sheep. They are capable enough of making up their own minds, of forming their own thoughts.

This is a source of torment to the radical intellectuals of today. It is a unique preoccupation of theirs that they crave the power and authority to regulate and control the lives and activities of others.

It is radical intellectuals who shriek loudest for restrictions on what people can say and think.

It is radical intellectuals who want to negate the rights and freedoms that it took us hundreds years to obtain.

It is radical intellectuals who do not believe ordinary people know what is best for them. It is radical intellectuals who fundamentally cannot accept that their inferiors can choose their own directions in life.

It is radical intellectuals who treat society as a mere laboratory for their theories, all the while ignoring the fact that the lives of people are very real, rather than pieces of analysable data to be assembled into pie charts or bar graphs.

And it is radical intellectuals who are intent on transforming the law of the land from a shield which protects the individual from the interference of others into the actual weapon of interference.

In this they have achieved some success with legislation which makes holding the wrong opinion a prosecutable offence.

But in the case of Milo Yiannopoulos their efforts have proved a monumental failure.

Their open letter, their threats to protest at the school, their pitiful howls of outrage on social media and their complaint to the Department for Education have been utterly self-defeating.

Milo Yiannopoulos has this week gone from little-known player on the edges of the political discourse to a national figure.

He has become the outrageous poster boy of the fight for free speech, the subject of numerous news stories and comment pieces – read not just in Kent, not just in Britain, but around the world.

Meanwhile, those who sought to silence him have emerged as intolerant, illiberal, naive fools.

I bet Milo is loving it.

Onetime Canterbury Rugby Club player Huw Jones has become the star of Scottish rugby after running in two tries on his home debut at Murrayfield earlier this month.

The Edinburgh-born 22-yearold, who attended the Junior King’s School, plies his trade in South Africa which may explain why he was not that well-known in the UK.

Huw plays for Cape Townbased Western Province in the domestic league and for The Stormers in Super Rugby. In fact, so successful has he been there, that there is a sixminute Youtube video of his greatest moments.

I recommend fans to seek it out.

I received an intriguing tweet after last week’s column about the petulant tantrums of well-educated, wellto-do people, in Canterbury following Donald Trump’s US presidential victory.

From someone going by the Twitter handle @milkfloat6, it says: “@Theharrybell on behalf of the vicariously annoyed i [sic] wish to complain that your column has far too much common sense in it...”

Erm, I’m assuming that is supposed to be a compliment...

A friend who went to Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Marlowe Theatre last week logged onto the website to fill in the online survey about his experience.

He had some points to make about the Pound Lane car park – such as the fact that it took ages to get out and there were delays at the ticket machines.

As he completed the survey, he noticed that the council had only offered two options for gender – male and female.

I do sincerely hope that, despite the drive to save money, Canterbury City Council has not divested itself of its diversity-inclusion commissar.

Hearing that my friend was deprived of a third, fourth or fifth option, I can only conclude that this is an outrage.

I am shocked, appalled, offended. I can’t breathe and I need to go and lie down.

Alex Lister tried to save the Red Lion, Wingham