The Sunday Mirror seems to have suddenly woken up and noticed that pubs are closing left, right and centre.
The local is in crisis. So today the Sunday Mirror calls on PM David Cameron to honour his election promise that his Government would be “pub-friendly and take the urgent action needed to protect a treasured national institution”.It’s funny how they weren’t quite so vocal when their friends in the Labour Party were in charge and busy doing their best to wreck the pub trade. But, even so, better late than never, and as we have seen the Coalition are enthusiastically continuing the anti-pub policies that Labour began. There’s even - right at the end - an acknowledgement of the elephant in the room:
The smoking ban dealt a devastating blow to thousands of traditional pubs. Takings nosedived by as much as 40 per cent at some town centre and inner city locals as smokers decided to drink at home. Supporters of the ban - introduced in Scotland in 2006 and the rest of the UK in 2007 - say it has made pubs more family friendly and people healthier. But street corner pubs with no beer garden have suffered badly.It may not do all that much to change things, but at least there’s a wider appreciation of the reasons behind the decline of the pub trade in the past few years. And, while supermarket pricing again gets part of the blame, was the differential really that much less before July 2007?
(h/t to Simon Clark at Taking Liberties)