A century ago, Britain had reason to despair. A generation had been lost to war, influenza was killing those who survived and revolution was sweeping across Europe. A strange new movement called the Blackshirts was marching on Rome just as Russia’s civil war was ending in Soviet victory. Yet Britons were out having fun.

The original Bright Young People cavorted across the country, holding scandalous parties. ‘Please wear a bathing suit and bring a bath towel and a bottle,’ read one invitation. The Metropolitan Police filled Bow Street’s cells with hundreds of nightclub revellers, mainly girls in fancy dress. Dancing, according to one clergyman, was a ‘very grave disease which is infecting the country’. This was the era of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, a novel of £1,000 wagers and orgies in 10 Downing Street. The old world was dying and the new one had yet to crawl out of bed.

Our era is almost as frail as the 1920s but the champagne corks are no longer flying

The 1920s had seen a rapid growth in street bookmakers, catering mainly to the working classes, and there were reformers who wanted an end to it. We are going through a similar backlash today, as Rupert Hawksley explains. Ultimately, the puritans of that era were defeated, thanks in part to the sensibilities of Spectator readers. ‘You cannot possibly stop betting,’ one wrote in a letter published a century ago this week. ‘Everyday life is in many respects a gamble in itself.’

If only we took the same approach today. Instead, taxes on booze are up, smoking is to be outlawed and good British fun is going the way of the flappers. Our era is almost as frail as the 1920s but the champagne corks are no longer flying. We are living through the Boring Twenties.

In 2005, Britons spent nearly an hour and a half a day socialising. Today, it’s half an hour. Once you adjust for inflation, every income group from richest to poorest has cut back on hotel and restaurant spending since the turn of the decade. It’s a similar story when it comes to cinema, theatre, concerts and sports events. The culprits are clear: government, bureaucratic safetyism and faceless capital. The first taxes the sources of fun, the second attempts to regulate it out of existence and the third flattens what remains.

‘I will support the great British pub,’ Rachel Reeves said at the Budget as she introduced a massive tax hike on pubs. Business rates for the Ship Inn at Brimscombe, Gloucestershire, will go from £8,000 to £31,750. Pandemic relief is coming to an end and four out of five pubs will see their rates spike in April. Over Christmas, multiple Labour MPs........

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