Clubbing — how much longer will our nightlife continue?
In the middle of September, the UK government suddenly backed down on compulsory vaccinations for nightclubs. Perhaps they felt that they had now coerced enough of the young into having their so-called ‘jabs’, but they clearly intend to maintain this as a semi-permanent threat, in case take-up of these increasingly ineffective vaccinations does not proceed as required.
Scotland and Wales — no strangers to liberal authoritarianism — have already introduced vaccine passports for nightclubs, although the Welsh government has also allowed the negative lateral flow test option.
For the rest of us, vaccine passports are now in — what is fast becoming the English, rather than UK — Government’s winter ‘Plan B’, which “could” be rolled out if the NHS comes under “unsustainable pressure” in coming months, an undefined situation and, therefore, able to be used as a justification whenever it suits the government.
But they have already started to create the feared two tier society with the ‘lifting of restrictions’ for returns from foreign holidays. In what is a blatant stick mendaciously masquerading as a carrot, the ‘Green list’ has been abandoned, with the merging of ‘Green’ and ‘Amber’ countries into a single ‘Go list’.
So there is no longer a separate list of countries which do not require any house arrest, (sorry, ‘quarantine’) at all. Instead, the ‘lifting’ of restrictions amounts to more oppression for all those returning from these ‘Go list’ countries who have declined the vaccinations: quarantine at home for 10 days, whilst the vaccine-compliant citizens do not have to suffer this. The evil ‘vaccine refusers’ also includes those who have decided against — with good reason, in most cases — having a second dose.
How can anyone in full-time work — particularly young people who might be just starting out on their rickety career ladder — afford to take a further 10 days off work to sit around at home?
Incidentally, amongst these selfish vaccine refusers is an elderly friend of ours, who had such serious and prolonged heart palpitations after her first dose that she thought she was going to have a heart attack. So a severe adverse reaction condemns her to the same post-holiday fate as the rest of a sizeable minority of the population.
And the intention — they make no bones about this — of their nascent two tier society is to increase uptake of these dangerous and substantially untested vaccines, which have rapidly diminishing effectiveness against all new and future variants of SARS-CoV-2.
The government’s Behavioural Insights Team’s fingerprints are all over the type of stuff which NHS Trusts are trotting out to persuade those pesky youngsters to see sense: ‘COVID-19 Jab Invite Letters Sent To One Million 16 And 17 Year Olds’.
All of the relentless destruction of society and our social fabric has been at the behest of one man, Boris Johnson, the most vain and hubristic prime minister we have ever had the misfortune to be ‘ruled’ by. Everything is framed by him as a neo-Churchillian ‘fight’. Mr Johnson is such a towering political genius that he will be able to ‘defeat’ the virus, obesity and the ‘climate crisis’, all in the space of one glorious term of office.
In my view, it is this deeply pathetic resolve to ‘defeat’ Covid-19 which is at the root of every decision he has made in the past two years. This is to be his legacy, or so he imagines.
O brave new world that has such people in’t!
But that proposed nightclub law had always seemed to me to be a reflection of an alarming and depressing Covid-fuelled anti-nightlife — or, in reality, anti-young people — fixation in this country. I was appalled to read that a poll from early July found that 26 per cent of people polled thought that nightclubs should be closed forever and 19 per cent that there should be a permanent 10pm curfew.
If I had asked somebody two years ago if they thought that nightclubs should be closed permanently, in order to prevent the spread of a disease, they would have wondered why I was even suggesting something so absurd.
But, during the intervening year and a half, absurdity has become reality and this whole idea — and more — seems to be viewed as a perfectly acceptable disease control measure by an alarmingly large minority of the population.
Have they never been young? Perhaps they simply emerged into a sort of resentful adult half-life, resenting the very idea of being young? Are they the ones that complain about our city centres being ‘no go areas’ at night, as if they are actually stalking around in the middle of our towns and cities at 3 or 4 in the morning glaring at young people, their resentment eating away at their hearts and souls?
The government plan for compulsory vaccinations to enter nightclubs was fuelled not just by the knowledge that restricting the enjoyment of boisterous young people would receive little opposition from the middle-aged. Lurking behind it was the same resentment, the same prejudice as those 19 or 26 per cent of the population.
After all, weren’t they the ‘super-spreaders’, the selfish hedonists who, every time there was even a large house party, were accused of ensuring further lockdowns, overwhelming ‘our beloved NHS’, with its angelic staff and — worse, the horror — killing their grandparents (or, at least, their grandmothers; the grandfathers never seemed to be at risk in this emotionally manipulative scenario)?
So, to a terrified and acquiescent population, shorn of their good sense many months ago, it was easy for the young to be transformed into a threat to be diminished, if not removed. And their ignorance has allowed them to treat young people as ‘the other’.
I wonder if these people with closed minds have ever sat in a car in the middle of London an hour before dawn chatting, eating a sandwich, listening to the birds who don’t seem to know it’s night time, then smoking a last cigarette before the long drive home — enjoying that peace which, in a city, is only present at that time of night. They’ve never experienced that wonderful quiet time: a time where everything closes in around you and it is just a peaceful, tired you and a peaceful night.
And, for us, we had the night-lovers’ mid-summer pleasure of leaving our rural village whilst the house martins raced each other through the evening sky and returning home to the wonder of the dawn chorus.
It should be obvious to anyone (except, perhaps, a philistine like Mr Johnson) that a mix of types of music and entertainment creates a thriving cultural environment. I like opera as well as electronic dance music; punk music, 50s and 60s musicals, good pop and rock music from any period; even some hip hop when pushed, but definitely no jazz funk (sorry). Having eclectic tastes breaks down barriers between us and avoids the conflicts of musical tribalism.
But some of the best nights of my life have undoubtedly been in a nightclub — particularly every Friday night at the 19th century ‘Opera House’ in Bournemouth. This was never actually an opera house, simply a theatre and music hall and was subsequently subsumed and renamed as the O2 Academy. But, for those of us who used to go there regularly, it will always be the Opera House.
Over the years, we’ve been to many clubs around England and even visits to the legendary Tunnel in Hamburg and the Paradiso in Anjuna, Goa. And a memorable night in Bulgaria, where we saw Puccini’s Turandot at the grand Sofia Opera and Ballet, had a meal with some people we met there and then moved on with our new friends to a punk club to dance and drink the night away.
Dancing to the driving, fast hypnotic beat of our favoured genre of electronic music (‘hard dance’) with like-minded people, some of whom I’ve known for 10 or 20 years, has been one of the true delights of my life. The age range is from 18 to over 60 — so not just the hated ‘young people’. It’s also something of a family affair: we and other people our age sometimes go with their grown-up children and their girlfriends or boyfriends.
This is a community of interest, with conversations revolving around favourite DJs, light-hearted disagreements about the many, many sub-genres of electronic dance music, venues you’ve been to recently and in the past.
These are pretty much the same type of performer/music/venue discussions we had at the many country house operas we’ve been to this summer or, come to that, at the punk gigs I went to in the 70s and 80s.
And, as middle-class, university-educated people, we get the chance to talk to ‘normal’ working people — van drivers, hairdressers, shop assistants, builders, ex-soldiers. It works both ways: one of our sons was out at a little club in a nearby town and a young chap who he talked to was pleased to find someone “like him”, who had similar, shall we say, ‘vaccine-sceptic’ views. So he now knows that not everyone who looks like a modern, young, virtue-signalling liberal is part of the patronising we-know-best middle-class, who have always been so ready to tell working class people what is best for them.
However, we have to accept that, despite the wide age range at the events we go to, this is still predominantly a young people’s pastime, so any restrictions on the freedom to go to nightclubs is based on frustration that a sizeable minority of ‘these people’ just do not want to allow themselves to be coerced or bullied.
I have had more than four decades of adulthood, so at least I can treasure the many fond memories of those 40 years of freedom.
In stark contrast, my 27 year old sons have only had nine years but, along with many of their friends, they have adopted the perfectly reasonable position of being unwilling to have any vaccine which has not yet completed its long-term trials and has resulted in a large number of adverse effects and deaths. If vaccine passports are introduced, I wonder if they will then actually be able to do anything for fun any more — gigs, clubs, festivals, holidays?
That’ll teach them, eh?
But I look at young people with their happy, unlined faces; their smiles and laughter and I see beauty. As Australian film director Baz Luhrmann’s said, in his 1999 spoken word song ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’:
“You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded; But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself; And recall in a way you can’t grasp now; How much possibility lay before you; And how fabulous you really looked”
Possibility. Indeed, that is the whole essence of youth — those long years stretching ahead of you, filled with the wonder of endless possibilities.
But this loathsome authoritarian government is hell-bent on destroying those possibilities, crushing hope, dictating for our beautiful young people a totalitarian future where their freedom is dependent on their medical history.
Could it be more depressing that a recent MailOnline article shows that fully 62 per cent of people polled think that people should be banned from nightclubs unless they have been vaccinated?
How dare they — all of them, the government and their army of petty, vindictive collaborators!
Finally, perhaps those who we have mistakenly put in charge of our lives and who are, even now, planning to introduce even more control over people’s lives in the name of their pathetic, forlorn drive to ‘end obesity’, might take note of the obvious: dancing is exercise and the more and faster you dance, the more exercise you get.
And mental health: young people — particularly young men, who are more vulnerable to depression and suicide than women — need to have fun and let off steam.
Clubbing, our small and harmless pleasure, is under threat of destruction in the fruitless ‘fight’ against a virus only a little more lethal than flu. “Sigh …”, I would add, on Twitter.