Reasons to be cheerful

In spite of doom-laden headlines ANDREW JEFFORD is in positive mood

Something odd's been going on. Snow shuts airports from New York to Chicago; avalanches come thumping down off the Alps; it's even been snowing in Majorca and Algiers.

Yet most of southern Britain has hardly seen a flake. Why has the fiercest winter in years spared us? It's obvious: we've been protected by colossal draughts of hot air.

There's been so much hot air blowing around the pub trade over the last couple of months that future gas and electricity bills should prove a pleasant surprise.

What has generated all of this heat? Changes to our licensing laws, allied to a growing national impatience with those who behave stupidly and anti-socially after consuming too much alcohol.

It's always easier to write negative copy than to praise, especially when politicians are concerned, but despite all this hot air I can't find much to be gloomy or acerbic about in the present debates. Things seem to me to be going well. We're moving forward. Here are my five reasons to be cheerful.

1. Saner licensing

I understand why licensees feel uncertain and frustrated by the changes that are under way in the Licensing Act 2003, the deficiencies of which have been so patiently anatomised by Peter Coulson in these pages. Yet its main thrust is a liberalising one (more flexible opening hours), and administratively it seeks to transfer the regulatory function from unelected magistrates to elected councillors and the communities they serve.

What does that mean? It means every licensee can tailor the service he or she provides to what customers require, and it means that pubs will have to work more closely with the communities they serve.

There will be teething problems, but those are laudable aims, since pubs depend entirely for their survival and prosperity on happy customers and good community relations.

2. The binge hangover

Only those whose surname is Van Winkle can fail to have noticed that alcohol-fuelled disorder has rocketed up the political agenda. Good. The first essential stage in solving a problem is recognising it, and the culture of alcohol abuse in Britain has to be tackled.

If the trade wants to avoid undesirable or draconian measures such as Alcohol Disorder Zones, then the remedies are there. Change the drink mix; ease back on the alcopops and shooters; cut out the cheap price deals; don't serve the already-inebriated, especially when they are under 30; find other ways of making up any feared lost profit; work together with fellow local licensees.

The huge changes in the pub scene over the last decade prove conclusively that there is no shortage in creative thinking in our trade. That thinking now needs to be turned towards ways in which pubs, and especially those serving younger drinkers in town centres, can be made happier and healthier places... and where the anti-social begin to feel unwelcome. Agreed, hangovers aren't much fun ­ but we learn from them.

3. The smoke is clearing

Regardless of the pros and cons of the planned legislation, the plain fact is that smoking in all public places is coming to an end in England, just as it has in Ireland and parts of the US and will soon in Scotland.

Wetherspoon's decision to make all of its pubs non-smoking by May 2006 is simply symptomatic of the fact that the tide in public opinion has already turned. Others will follow, and the legislation may (as usual in Britain) follow rather than lead.

I repeat what I've said before: by 2020 it will seem incredible that people ever smoked in pubs, just as it now seems incredible that they used to smoke in cinemas, theatres, buses, tube trains and aeroplanes. The trick will be finding the right (ie, most profitable) moment to make the switch.

4. Humiliation for the Daily Mail

The Daily Mail has in part built its vast circulation on mean-spirited, small-minded, scare-mongering and simplistic campaigning.

Now, at least, the pub business and the drinks industry can see this for themselves following this paper's ludicrous efforts against "24-hour drinking", as if the Government and the pub trade were trying to make permanent inebriation obligatory. Not to mention the Mail's hypocrisy on 22 January in promoting free bottles of wine from Unwins as a sale gimmick on the same front page as it lambasts pubs for "getting off lightly in Binge Britain".

One trusts that Britain's licensees will make copies of the Daily Mail as unwelcome in their premises as shaven-headed, foul-mouthed 19-year-olds in Burberry baseball caps.

5. The return of full-pint politics

Yes, it's back! My favourite piece of failed legislation; the one that has proved harder to bury than Abba revival bands or Elvis impersonators.

The hero of the hour is MP Dennis Turner, whose Early Day Motion has been signed by 120 MPs, all exercised (as they should be) that pubs sell 200 million more pints each year than they buy.

I want a full pint every time. I rarely get it, and I'm bored and frustrated by the inevitable grouchiness from bar staff when you ask for it. So generally I don't ask for it; I just simmer quietly, feeling frustrated and ripped off. This abuse should have ended years ago.

Experience suggests, though, that the brewers, pubcos, licen-see's associations and their tame parliamentary stooges will nobble any eventual legislation once again ­ but, what the hell, I'm in such a good mood that I'm allowing hope to spring eternal.