BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
There is a quiet tragedy unfolding in the public houses and eateries of this sceptred isle. Not war, nor pestilence, nor even one of those ghastly craft ales now passing for bitter. No, it is a tragedy of mouthfeel. The tragedy of the paper straw.
Cast your mind back, if not yet addled by the creeping conformity of the age, to the halcyon late twentieth century. The plastic straw was not merely a utensil; it was a slender, unbreakable arrow of progress, a thermoplastic testament to our dominion over matter. You could spear an olive, stir a G&T with brio, and, crucially, finish a long Pimm’s on the lawn without the thing dissolving into fibrous mush halfway through the test match. Life, in its small, sippable way, was on the up. The future was crisp, rigid, and defiantly synthetic.
Then came the great reversal. The priests of the new religion—so-called progressives—decreed our sipping habits an affront to the planet. With the zeal of iconoclasts smashing stained glass, they cast out the polymer and resurrected its waterlogged ancestor. We did not advance; we retreated. We swapped the space age for the Stone Age.
And how has this grand experiment fared? One need only attempt a chilled beverage on a humid July afternoon to witness the abject failure. Within thirty seconds, the paper straw assumes the structural integrity of a damp dishrag. It bends, wilts, imparts a distinct flavour of corrugated cardboard and existential despair to one’s elderflower cordial. It is a product designed by committee for a world that no longer believes in joy. It does not solve the climate; it merely salves the conscience of the metropolitan elite, leaving the rest of us to fish sodden detritus from our glasses.
One cannot help but note that the only world leader with the intestinal fortitude to call this farce what it is, is that mad fellow across the pond. Donald Trump—a man not often accused of subtlety—has nonetheless spotted the fundamental absurdity. He has remarked, with the blunt instrument of common sense, that paper straws are “rubbish.” And he is right. In a sea of simpering, virtue-signalling waffle, his voice cuts through—not because he is a visionary, but because he possesses the basic observational skills of a man who has tried to drink a McDonald’s Diet Coke on a moving golf cart.
That a New York property mogul should become the accidental tribune of drinking-straw sanity tells you everything about how thoroughly the intelligentsia have lost their grip on the rudimentary.
This lunacy, however, is not confined to the drinking straw, (nor to the bird-slaying windmills which feature regularly in the pages of this magazine). It is the governing principle of our age. We have become a nation of archaeological reverse-engineers, exhuming the failures of yesteryear and presenting them as innovations.
Consider the electric vehicle. We spent a century perfecting the internal combustion engine—a glorious, roaring testament to human ingenuity that conquered continents and liberated the common man from the tyranny of the horse. Yet the progressive, clutching his carbon calculator like a rosary, insists we return to the glorified milk float. Never mind that the thing requires lithium dragged from the earth by child labour in Congo, and emits more particulates from its tyres than a diesel van. Never mind that it cannot tow a horsebox, cannot survive a Scottish winter, and requires a national grid that cannot even keep the kettle boiling at teatime.
The progressive does not drive; he performs penance. He does not journey; he atones. The internal combustion engine was freedom; the EV is a surveillance-state golf buggy with a range anxiety complex.
Consider the return to rail. We closed the branch lines for good reason—they were slow, expensive, and carried more pigeons than people. Dr Beeching was not a vandal; he was a realist with a slide rule and a grasp of arithmetic. But no. The progressive hypocrite, in his oil-based anorak and his righteous fury, demands we reopen those cuts as though they were wounds of war rather than acts of economic sanity. So now we sit on pacific rattlers, trundling at 45 miles per hour through rain-sodden countryside, paying first-class fares for a service that would embarrass a Balkan state, all while congratulating ourselves on our “sustainability.” It is not transport; it is a mobile guilt-trip. We have swapped the express for the ox-cart and called it progress.
Consider the reusable coffee cup. We invented the disposable cup—hygienic, convenient, a miracle of modern materials that kept our hands burn-free and our lips un-scalded. Now we are compelled to carry our own ceramic vessels, like mediaeval peasants with their wooden bowls, rinsing them in public lavatories, spreading god-knows-what germs across the nation, all to save a teaspoon of plastic that will outlast our grandchildren anyway.
We have exchanged civilisation for chore. We have traded sterility for salmonella and called it virtue.
The great irony—and it is an irony so vast it could swallow the House of Commons—is that these items were made obsolete for a reason. They failed the test of utility. They were not killed by corporate greed; they were killed by the quiet, democratic verdict of human convenience. We chose plastic because it worked. We chose the car because it was swift. We chose the train line’s closure because it was economically rational. The market, that most democratic of institutions, voted with its feet. To reverse these choices is not progress; it is penance. It is self-flagellation designed to assuage the guilt of our prosperity. It is the hair-shirt of the suburban liberal.
The progressive knows the paper straw won’t save the planet. The ritual is the point—virtue as signal, inconvenience as sacrament. It is competitive compassion, performed for an audience of one’s own reflection.
And so we sit, sipping tepid lemonade through collapsing mulch, waiting for trains that never come, dragged by milk floats that cannot reach the next parish—all to the faint hum of moral superiority. We have traded the future for a past that never was, the optimism of our fathers for the pessimism of our masters. We prefer gesture to outcome, symbol to substance, the soggy straw to the satisfying sip.
The paper straw is not a solution; it is a surrender. Until we see that the only thing truly biodegradable in this movement is its intellectual rigour, we shall remain a nation drowning—not in plastic, but in our own pious melancholy.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Dear Townies and Conservatism (2024).