April 5, 2010 Bed, Breakfast and Moral Regulation
The hotel inspector Dawn met judges standards in B&Bs, making a virtue of cleanliness and ‘good’ service. B&B owners, in turn, judge and regulate their customers. Chris Grayling, currently shadow home secretary, thinks christian B&B owners should be allowed to turn away guests they consider to be sinners. Markets don’t just reflect (notionally private) moralities; they actively produce them, through ideas about what service ought to be like, or how customers ought to behave. Regulation intervenes to alter the market: to generate trust by awarding 4 stars, or to proscribe unequal treatment on the basis of sexual identity. Grayling implies that running a B&B is distinctly different from running a hotel, because it is ‘home’ as much as ‘work’, as I’ve argued here. But to participate in the public world of the market, the B&B owner must sign up to the liberal individualism that permits free sexual expression and conceives of the men in room 26 as customers above all else.