Ostriches spotted in Manchester

I was struck by this piece from Chimp magazine (?!) who gathered together a panel to discuss the state of the pub trade in Manchester.

The item closest to The Chimp’s heart, though, was the panel on the putative demise of the Great British Boozer. And what a thoughtfully selected panel it was: Oliver Robinson of Robinson’s Brewery, Jan Rogers of Marble Brewery, Cleo Farman of Odd Group and John Quilter, former proprietor of now defunct Marmalade in Manchester 21.

Their discussions contained the astonishing statement that:

The panel also concurred that the smoking ban had had zero effect on their bottom line, and at least two of them enjoy a fag now and then to our knowledge, so no baccy-free evangelism here.

Now, that may be true for handful of metrosexual bars in Chorlton and Central Manchester, but surely these people cannot be blind to the pub devastation in Manchester’s suburbs and satellite towns. And are they saying that every single pub operator who has attributed reduced profits to the smoking ban over the past few years has been lying? Take this, for example, from J. W. Lees earlier this year:

JW Lees, the family-owned brewery based in Middleton, blamed another poor summer and the continuing impact of the smoking ban introduced in 2007 for a 34 per cent drop in profits in the year to March 31, 2009.

And I can’t honestly believe that is Oliver Robinson’s opinion, given the number of his company’s pubs that have closed over the past three years.

The continued denial of reality from some sections of the pub trade, while pubs continue to tumble like ninepins around them, is truly amazing.

A RANT AND AN APOLOGY

I had to take a few minutes out to post up a rant - and an apology - about ecigs.

I always felt threatened by them because I feared that normalising the use of those, and denormalising the use of tobacco, would lead to us all having to become vapers and choice to use the natural plant product would be denied in time.

Then I hear about this and moves to make ecig smoking illegal

Some vapers I know have been saying for ages that this is the way things are going for them. The anti-smoking industry doesn't own any shares in the ecig market. Vapers say that smokers who choose to vape, as a way of avoiding tobacco use, are not allowed to quit tobacco smoking unless they buy Big Pharma cessation products.

The apology comes from my previous bigotted comments about vapers based on the assumption that ecigs were something they are not.

Yes, I guess we're all in it together brothers and sisters.

HT - Dave Atherton

Tilting the scales

Phil Mellows points out here two aspects of the Coalition’s proposed licensing reforms that have the potential to cause serious problems for the pub trade. It is planned to drop the requirement for objectors to licences to live “in proximity” to the premises in question, and also to add the “promotion of public health” to licensing objectives.

In combination these measures could open the way for alliances of public objectors, ideologically motivated by a general dislike of pubs, drinking and people enjoying themselves. Indeed, the germ of such an organised force already exists, set up by the temperance-funded Institute of Alcohol Studies.

So this gives some miseryguts in Stockton the right to object to a pub licence in Stockport just because it’s a pub and therefore a source of moral degeneracy?

And how on earth is a pub supposed to “promote public health”? While it may create a lot of human happiness, and thus improve people’s state of mind, it can’t really be said that a pub, especially a wet-led one, promotes health in the terms defined by the Righteous. Does any other type of business have such a pious aspiration loaded on to it?

As with many other such things, in the short term this may seem as though it’s nothing much to be worried about, but in the long run it must have the potential to come back and bite pubs with a vengeance. This is not “rebalancing” the licensing laws, but tipping them very steeply against the pub trade. And the more pubs become sanitised temples of health, the more their customers will turn to the arms of Tesco and informal social gatherings on private premises.