Fight them and their speeches

When Churchill was planning the Victory Day celebrations in 1945, he famously told his staff: "Make sure the brewers have enough beer."

Contrast that with the curmudgeonly attitude of today's rulers. Here we are, in our worst recession in living memory, with six pubs disappearing daily, alcohol sales plummeting, pubcos and brewers axing staff, share prices in freefall, and what does our Government do? Just goes and dumps another multi-million pound set of trading costs on our once glorious industry with its new mandatory retailing code, that's what. And this at a time when people need pubs to help cheer them up, and when problem drinking is declining anyway... Churchill must be turning in his grave.

Not that this is really about just problem drinking. The Home Office drafters of the new code give the game away in their report when they talk about using the measures to drive down total alcohol consumption in the UK. Undebated in Parliament, that has become a policy aim in itself. The new tobacco indeed.

Of course, the report points its finger firmly at the trade's Achilles heel, the pubs and bars who've put two fingers up to professional retailers and traded with outrageous promotions. The KPMG review — you remember that unlauded document — visited 418 inner city on-trade premises and found two offering drink-all-you-can for the entry fee, four offering free drinks "in large quantities" and eight offering free drinks to specific groups. It's on the basis of these findings — extrapolated by KPMG to about 2,000 irresponsible premises across the trade in total — that the other 80,000-odd pubs, bars and clubs in England and Wales are to be forced to fork out for over £1,000 a year on staff training, new wine glassware, new Optics and much labelling information in their pubs. Where is the sense or justice in that?

MA has argued before that pubs should train their staff, particularly their new staff, and they should offer 125ml wine glasses as well as other sizes. We're a professional industry, aren't we?

But that's quite different from saying that because of a tiny proportion of bad retailers, everyone else must now shell out over a thousand pounds each year to get their house in order.

Government has to look at this in the context of what's happening to pubs now.

If the mandatory code is to be imposed, surely its introduction can be deferred until better times? If not, can't the costs be offset against a special tax break? When over £2bn each year will apparently be saved in health and police costs by the code, surely that's the least to ask.

Yet even that is probably too much from a Government that seems intent on going down in history as the biggest pub wrecker of all time. Winston, where are you?