If Britain loses its nightclubs it loses a vital part of its national DNA

It’s a stark fact: Britain’s nightclubs have been closed for about 66 weeks and their owners are facing an ever-worsening crisis.

Since the pandemic hit, and social distancing measures have meant that night life has no longer been viable, MPs have rightly warned that this economic and cultural pillar risked extinction without government support, but they were not heeded.

It’s unsurprising that there is little political will to help the sector. Nightlife has never been given the recognition it deserves for its contribution to our culture, wellbeing, and economy. Pre-pandemic our night-time economy was the fifth biggest industry in the country, employing one in every 13 workers, and with a turnover of £92bn.

That isn’t to glamorise the sector. Antisocial hours fuse with often exploitative working conditions, and widespread instances of sexual harassment have led nightclubs to be described as “the world #MeToo has left behind”.

Big business stole football from the grassroots, and the same goes for nightclubs. The Windrush generation played a pioneering role in the creation of modern nightlife – from sound systems to nightclubs. But from the 1990s it was increasingly only white-owned major corporate ventures that could afford the ever more prohibitive costs of running venues in popular spots. In 2017, revered Soho club G-A-Y had its annual rent hiked from £300,000 to £700,000 , combined with a clobbering from surging business rates for small venues.

Dan Beaumont, the owner of Dalston Superstore in Hackney, east London, points out another problem. “Late-night licensing in London is managed by 33 different local authorities who all have a vested interest in trying to push out what they see as difficult late venues, because there’s no pan-London strategy for licensing,” he tells me. The most motivated and engaged voters as far as local councillors are concerned, after all, are not younger partygoers, but older citizens who may be preoccupied with what they consider the annoyance of late-night revellers. Even before the pandemic, one in five UK nightclubs vanished in 2018 alone.

There are other trends that are more difficult to combat – if you’re looking for love, an app may now be preferable to making a move on the dancefloor, contributing to falling footfall – but a perfect storm has had devastating consequences. This is especially pertinent for queer venues, which where historically seen as safe places to find partners. By 2017, for example, the number of LGBTQ venues in London had fallen from 125 to 53 in just over a decade.

This was not a sector well-prepared for global catastrophe. Without the furlough scheme, of course, the situation would now be apocalyptic, and venues have been helped by local authority grants and cultural recovery funds, though these are all something of a lottery. But many of the freelancers who sustain and depend on nightlife – those who juggle working the door, DJing, performing, designing and promoting – have often fallen through the not insignificant cracks of state support.

“When your space is closed down, what happens, where is the protection for freelance artists,” as Cassie Leon of the cabaret Cocoa Butter Club puts it. “Things like the freelance grants the government provided are a really, really small amount to be sustainable in a situation when you don’t know how long it’s going to last.”

While there’s been a moratorium on rent evictions, it has left nightclubs saddled with terrifying piles of debt: nearly nine out of 10 of them owe more than two quarters’ worth of rent, and that’s without considering tax arrears and paying back Covid business interruption loans. No wonder, then, that the Night Time Industries Association has warned that without government help on rents, three-quarters of venues face bankruptcy.

“At its best, nightlife forms the DNA of the best bits about being British,” as Beaumont tells me. “Our cultural exports often originate from nightlife and club culture.” It isn’t simply about the right of younger people to have a good time – important as this is: allowing the sector to wither away is an act of profound cultural vandalism.

If we don’t want a post-Covid world that is greyer and stripped of cultural pleasures, the government is surely duty bound to provide far greater financial relief for a sector in desperate need of assistance. For those who sacrificed a considerable amount of their younger life to preserve Britain from an even greater calamity than that we have endured, the right to a good time should be preserved. But if our nightlife is snuffed out, the whole country will be poorer for it.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist