Lay off my Local takes off

by getting customers to sign our petition, we can confront the peddlers of lies about the trade

Andrew Pring, Editor

Morning Advertiser readers have welcomed our Lay off my Local campaign and told us in no uncertain terms to keep it going.

Don't worry. We will. It's a real pleasure for us at the MA to sit down and remind ourselves of all the things we like about pubs, and to write about the wonderful things that you people have dedicated your lives to creating.

But, of course, this is not just a love-in to make licensees feel a little bit better about themselves. The point of our campaign and why it's so important to really get behind it is that we use it to show the nation's opinion formers exactly how vital pubs are to the health and happiness of so many millions in Britain today.

By getting your customers to sign our petition, we can use that ground swell of support to confront the peddlers of downright lies about the pub community and get them to acknowledge the blatant misrepresentation they have shamelessly and cynically been guilty of over the past six months.

We can also, ironically, come to the aid of our beleaguered Government, which could well do with some support as it tries desperately in the face of a hostile media to keep its licensing programme on track. So trenchant has the opposition been to the new Licensing Act and its possible ramifications, that Government must be wondering why it ever bothered to go down this route of longer hours. Of course, many licensees perhaps most will also be wishing Government had never embarked on this path. But we are where we are and it would be the ultimate folly to retreat now.

So it would stiffen Government's resolve to stick to the tenets of the new Act if they can be reminded by the nation's drinkers that licensees can be trusted with the new licensing regime. And that will be particularly useful when the licensing review that was announced this week takes place some time in February next year. The last outcome we want from that review is a sharp shift of power towards local authorities. They already have perfectly sufficient controls over local pubs: there is no need to give them power to reduce licensees to begging on their knees to make their living in this life-enhancing trade. As we say, Lay off my Local.