Every day this year, we are told, yet another pub in Great Britain will close its doors for the last time. So says the British Beer and Pub Association, which predicts this week that 378 more pubs in England, Scotland and Wales will have brought down the shutters before the end of the year, never to raise them again.
This is up from 350 closures last year, and will bring the number remaining open to its lowest in more than a century, even though the population has swollen by roughly 50 per cent since the 1920s.
Miserably, too, it will add thousands more to the toll of 69,000 jobs in hospitality that have already disappeared since Rachel Reeves‘s Budget less than nine months ago.
As regular readers will know, pubs have been close to my heart all my life, since those Sundays in my childhood, when, as a special treat after church, my siblings and I would drink fizzy orange in the garden of the Dundas Arms in Kintbury, Berkshire, while our parents drank inside.
They have been an invaluable source of employment to millions like me, my wife and all four of our sons – all of whom did shift-work behind bars in our younger days, either to bring in a little welcome pocket money during our gap years and holidays, or to help pay the rent when we were looking for full-time careers.
Indeed, as I may have mentioned before, when I proposed to Mrs U on our first ever meeting she was pulling pints behind the bar at my then London local, to top up her wages as a secretary.
True, the money was less than generous. But pub work was always a convivial and readily available introduction to the grown-up world in which we would have to make our living.
I just wonder how many of the opportunities we enjoyed will be open to students and others in the future, after this present Government has done its worst?
During his childhood, Tom Utley and his siblings would drink fizzy orange in the garden of the Dundas Arms in Kintbury, Berkshire
It’s almost as if Sir Keir Starmer called his ministers together for a brainstorming session when he came to power, demanding answers to the question: ‘How can we destroy as many jobs as possible, while at the same time causing maximum damage to a cherished British institution?’
They certainly had no shortage of ideas.
‘How about raising the minimum wage to a level that pub landlords can’t afford to pay?’
‘Brilliant! And we could tighten the thumbscrews by cranking up business rates and employers’ National Insurance contributions. That should force them to lay off staff and banish any thoughts they may have had of recruiting more!’
‘I like it. What about you, Angela? Anything to throw into the pot?’
Ms Rayner: ‘Well, don’t laugh, but what about including an anti-banter clause in my Bill to increase workers’ rights? We could give bar staff the power to sue their bosses if they happen to overhear something a customer says that upsets them.’
Sir Keir: ‘That’s just the sort of off-the-wall thinking I’m looking for. There’s nothing like the stress of an unaffordable lawsuit to drive job-creators out of business. Good for us human rights lawyers, too. Any other thoughts?’
‘Here’s something. You know how smokers have always been among the most loyal pub-goers in the land? Well, we’ve already driven a lot of them away by banning smoking inside pubs. How about getting rid of most of the rest by banning it in the open air, too, on the pavement or in the beer garden?’
Sir Keir: ‘Great! But I’m looking for a real clincher to dissuade anyone from applying for bar-work, in the unlikely event that any will be available.’
Up speaks another bright spark: ‘Got it! Why don’t we increase both taxes and state benefits, to the point where it pays people more to slob around at home doing nothing, claiming they feel depressed, than to work full-time behind a bar?’
Sir Keir: ‘Superb! This has been a hugely valuable session, guys. With ideas like these, just think how we’ll be able to wreck the pub trade, among many others, before the next election. Let’s get out there and do it.’
Of course, no such meeting actually took place. But what we do know is that the Government has been busy putting every one of these moronic ideas into practice.
Meanwhile, the Treasury’s hapless spokesman can only bluster: ‘We are a pro-business Government, and we know the vital importance of pubs to local communities and the economy.’ (To which millions will no doubt reply: ‘You have a funny way of showing it!’)
The spokesman goes on: ‘That is why we are supporting them with business rates relief, a 1p cut to alcohol duty on draught pints, capping corporation tax and are protecting the smallest businesses from the employer National Insurance rise, which is helping to fund the NHS.’
Let’s focus on that 1p cut in the duty on a pint of draught beer. Is the Chancellor really so out of touch that she’s unaware how, thanks largely to her policies, the average price of a pint in the UK has risen by no less than 21p since last year, when Labour came to office?
If you ask me, it would almost have been wiser of Rachel Reeves to have announced no cut in beer duty at all, rather than insulting us by pretending she was doing the pub trade a massive favour by shaving off that derisory penny. We’re not as stupid as she seems to think.
As for that reference to funding the NHS, the message there was as clear as it was economically crass: ‘Only by introducing these job-destroying, growth-crushing policies will we be able to carry on shovelling taxpayers’ billions into the voracious craw of the unreformed health service.’
Well, there was once a time when citing the needs of the NHS might have tugged at the nation’s heart-strings – an age when most of us truly believed that the NHS was the envy of the world.
But that was long before the multiple scandals of recent years, with all those tales of horrendous bureaucratic waste, patients cruelly neglected in decaying hospitals and others kept waiting in pain for month after month for desperately needed operations.
How many of us still love the NHS, at this time when resident doctors are dragging it ever further into disgrace, by threatening to inflict pain and untold misery on patients until taxpayers are forced to meet yet another wildly exorbitant pay demand?
No, the health service loses more and more friends as every month goes by.
Meanwhile, Britain’s pubs retain the place they’ve held for centuries in the nation’s hearts, as the hubs of our communities, forums of laughter, gossip and common sense, and blessed refuges from the strains and irritations of an increasingly crazy world.
As for me, I no longer have the slightest wish to save the NHS, in its current unreformed state. But for the sake of our mental health, leave our pubs alone!
