Everyone needs the odd free lunch

On the meanness of English public life

L’avaro (The Miser). Antonio Piccini, 1878

Earlier this year I was in Bilbao, on the way back from a friend’s wedding. We picked the wrong day to be there – it was a Monday, meaning most of the major museums were shut. And so, in the want of open places to visit, we went to the Museum of Basque Nationalism. It also doubles as the headquarters of the EAJ-PNV, the mainstream Basque nationalist party. After dealing with the initial surprise of the receptionist, we obtained our audio guides and followed them down to the basement. Down there, there was a conference room and a meeting in progress, and a buffet which had been put out and half-consumed. As is our nature, my spouse and I helped ourselves to a few cakes and sweets, and then followed our guides back out, fed and watered by the excess gastronomy of the Basque political class.

I was thinking about this in relation to something Labour leader Keir Starmer said in his conference speech last week:

Conference, we have to be a government that takes care of the big questions so working people have the freedom to enjoy what they love. More time, more energy, more possibility, more life. 

It could be football. Could be fishing. Or just quiet time with your family. 

The little things in life are indeed important. But I think that little Basque vignette of free food for strangers – albeit supplied in our case in an accidental manner – is a crucial part of what’s also lacking in the UK at the moment, namely a bit of generosity in public life.

The UK has become an ungenerous place, where the idea that there’s no such a thing as a free lunch reigns supreme, and has become on left and right alike a place of martialling scarcity, from houses to freelance assignments, rather than sharing abundance. What Starmer is saying is then only half of it; of course, the UK government needs to take care of the big things, which manifestly do not work well in Britain today, but the UK also needs to be a place where the small things are done in a way which is a little easier too.

Those of you who have travelled in Spain will know that in every café or bar, no matter how small your order, you’ll be brought a little bit of food too. Even some 1.00€ green tea comes with the offer of a small cup of soup. It’s instinctive, it’s built-in to the culture, and it’s welcoming. It makes life nicer.

Where is this largesse in the UK? You might have a night out in a lovely London pub and the talk will be of the highest class and the surroundings splendid but your drinks order will still add up to £40. I did once used to drink in an Irish pub where they laid out free party food in tandem with big football matches, but it wasn’t something I experienced elsewhere. Otherwise you’re looking at three quid just to buy a small bag of nuts. Why not put out a few bowls of nuts? Because of the rents, comes the answer, and there is a huge wall of ever-tighter overheads between English public life and offering anything for free.

You particularly notice this is arts and arts-adjacent milieus, where freebies have long been part of the compensation for the unreliability of the paydays. The biggest gig of my comedy career occurred in 2015 when I played Quatsch comedy club, one of the most famous in Germany, as part of an English-comedy night there. Before the show, I was asked if I wanted anything and I said some fruit – and so I was brought a plate of lovely fresh fruit. In London I used to compere a three-hour show, a three-hour show for pity’s sake, for £10 and a pint of Guinness. Of course, I’m comparing a top-level gig in one country to a low-level gig in the other, but still; in the UK there’s often not even the courtesy when you’re hosting comedians to put out some tap water. You have to actually beg for water.

And this goes beyond just the small stuff too – it extends to a general attitude to the role that art plays in society, the endless Tory Ministers who counsel vocational subjects and demand degrees which lead to a job within 15 months instead. It’s the idea of the arts as something luxurious, decadent, as opposed to one of the essential areas of a free society and the charm of life. The why we live as opposed to just how.

I view the insane politics which convulse the arts sector as a manifestation of not decadence but precariousness, a way for artists to maximise their chances of winning incredibly small stakes. If there was just more about, people would not be fighting so bitterly to denounce others; it is rather like the explanation that Simone de Beauvoir provided for why women fight amongst each other from a position of shared oppression in order to obtain social rewards. It’s not about artists not getting rich – some UK artists still get rich – but about the absence of a wider class of people who can live relatively comfortably from their art. It’s the absence of the perfectly acceptable German concept of the Kleinkünstler, the low-level, not well-known, but always-working performer.

There’s also just a fear and suspiciousness baked into English public life, encapsulated in our culture of bad customer service. London is full of that – people who work in customer service who seem to hate the concept of both customers and service. A few years back I hosted an open-mic night in a pub, another long affair full of poets and comics and musicians. On the first day, I struggled to get the tech set-up getting, due to my own lack of knowledge of PA systems rather than anything being broken. Yet I remember the landlord, hearing of this, rather than offering any help or assistance immediately reacting with ‘That’s not good’, assuming I’d broken it, and telling me how much he’d invested in the equipment. I get it - of course his margins are tight and his profits, as a football pub which didn’t always have a matchday, unreliable.

Yet his was the same guy for whom I was bringing in business. He could have at least been civil about it. This is what happens to people when they live pinched, cramped lives, worrying about every penny; eventually the night was discontinued after he refused to keep paying us £30 to host. It was because the comedians weren’t spending any money on drink – and again, at £5 a pint, performing for free, how could they?

What we need is just the extra of sorts, the free meal, the free drink, the free buses laid on after a music event. The people in a French hotel who unprompted brought my fellow tour guide and I two shorts of Calvados at the end of a long day. The brief moments of hospitality which provide a respite from the demands of things. I’m now chiefly against NHS privatization not because I think the model is working brilliantly but because it provides some kind of break from the shabby tightfisted struggle of English life.

Christopher Hitchens, talking about leaving the UK in the ‘80s, said that one of the key things he hated was the meanness of England, the way people used to fuss about giving him free matches in a pub. I used to think this was trivial; now I absolutely get it, the wearying nature of a penny-pinching mentality. NIMBYism, too, is a sort of spiritual ungenerosity, a refusal to let future generations have it as good as you; it is moral failure expressed in trying to block your neighbour’s kitchen extension.

Those of you who have lived both on the continent and in the UK will know that there is often an officiousness and inflexibility to state bureaucracy on the continent that even the worst of England, no matter how stupid its rules, struggles to match. We have the human capital to make things better. At the moment, though, we seem to be succumbing to our worst instincts.

The other day I was at a birthday party full of people from all over Europe. I found myself thinking, as they exchanged libations, languages and food freely and generously, switching between languages as they did: It does make sense, at this moment, that the England I know now would isolate itself from all this. If it continues, I suspect a great many more British people will go in search of bigger lives elsewhere.