Man the guns on a burning deck

The Government's latest blundering attempts to legislate the pub trade out of existence would be laughable — but for the fact that the Department of Health and at least half the Home Office seem determined to make them harsh reality.

The proposals of the Responsible Alcohol Sales Taskforce are so vastly disproportionate to the problems they're designed to tackle that it makes you wonder if the report's author has ever actually been in a pub. (Except that it's probably illegal to say things like that now — after all, the report says we must "not show disrespect to people who choose not to drink alcohol", don't you know.)

But come on! Drug searches twice a day in every pub? Mystery shopper visits for any pub that's part of a £5m turnover group? Training for every casual or part-time bar worker? Alcohol health warnings on every communication any pub makes to its neighbourhood? Taking the age of every customer in your pub? Click-counting the number of people entering your pub? Consulting with the police every time there's a big sporting event on TV?

The list just goes on and on and drives any reader to the brink of utter despair.

Is this really to be the future of the pub trade? Because if it is, we might as well all just hit the supermarkets and get quietly sozzled at home. Certainly, the recruitment drive to find new licensees for the few pubs left will have completely dried up. Who in their right mind would want to come in to run a "pub" in this joyless and strangulated existence?

So, in the face of this rubbish, surely at last our trade can unite and throw these plans on a mighty bonfire? No hidden agendas to divide us here, surely? We're all going to be equally hit if the health and Home Office fanatics get their way.

Well, let's hope so. And as we said last week, the Government can be made to listen.

But how much easier it would be to make the politicians listen if we could mount the national campaign that all right-minded people in this trade are hoping for. That pro-pub campaign, like the one the Irish have been running recently.

One boss of a leading pubco remarked to MA last week that the trade is on "a burning deck." Unless trade bodies and leaders get their act together, there will not be much of the trade left to protect.

How right he is. And many others feel the same. Unless we can defend ourselves more fiercely, the red tape will just keep on coming — and operating become well-nigh impossible.

Tim Martin has made this point countless times. He needs more top trade people to get behind him and keep making the same point to the spotty adolescents who pass for policy makers these days.