Time@thebar
The smoking ban gave them the cancer, and it’s been exacerbated by the recession. Beer sales are at their lowest since the Great Depression in the 1930s, a missed business opportunity on both occasions you might say, misery likes company, especially the drunken kind. However, thousands of local pubs are shutting down, and I think it’s one of the best economic indicators going.
Firstly it shows what Government intervention does, often the opposite of what it ostensibly intends. Like other unpopular mandates, the smoking ban wasn’t legislature arising from public consultation, neither was it on the radar of pressing political issues at the time. Motion passed or not, enforcement should have remained at the sole discretion of the publicans themselves. A nationwide prohibition by our central planners does not allow for common sense to rule in the many differing circumstances where the law is applied. A small, dank, alehouse down a side street is not a metropolitan cocktail bar. The first is where life happens and the second where there happens to be life. Never the twain shall meet.
Empowering the landlords to take decisions of installing ventilation, or of reserving areas such as the old tap rooms, banning altogether or not at all. With the high density of pubs around Britain, plenty of choice could have been offered to the consumer whilst allowing the pubs with the correct business model to continue to thrive. That feeds back into the economy in more ways than one.
As expected, the clientel that left those inner city boozers were never replaced by rosy cheeked casual wine drinkers enticed by the new food area and patio. It has devastated the industry. As the working men’s clubs close, those rosy cheeked casual wine drinkers might yet see the skinheads in their nice pubs. Government intervention usually backfires like this, which is why I await with great trepidation the ugly outcome of the economic stimulus programme.
Second, the abandoned bars stand in contrary defiance to a media who are still trying to mollify the public and talk up an early recovery. Until the decline halts; until those steel shutters are defenestrated, there is no return to growth in this country. If there’s anything we British are still industrious at, it’s drinking. If there’s no disposable income for even that, then discretionary spending is at an absolute low and you can expect our consumer based economy to further contract. No massaging of quarterly statistics will convince me otherwise.
Beautiful downtown Bramall Lane.
