Pete Robinson: Mandatory madness

Consultation, in Nu-Labour parlance, means "we'll pretend to listen to you then we'll do whatever the hell we want". If you're lucky you may even get a pat on the head and a 'thank you' for your views.

A "Mandatory Code Of Practice" is, in itself, an oxymoron. A code-of-practice is a self-imposed agreement. Suffix that with the M-word and it becomes a bureaucratic licence to gratuitously control and punish.

One should consider this part of our Government's scorched earth policy. Despite their best efforts they've been unable to annihilate the British Pub so they are leaving a legacy to ensure those ends are met after they've gone.

When the mandatory code passes into law there will be those of us who'll be droning on about how it isn't really that bad. Only those pubs that deserve to be regulated need worry, 'badly run'

boozers should have their licences revoked, blah, blah, the trade's undying quest for 'excellence', blah, blah, the benefits of 'evolution', blah, blah.

That'll certainly be the Government's mantra. And on the surface it could even be said they have a point. But does anyone believe, for one moment, that the original 'code' will remain unaltered?

Of course not. Even from the scant information already released it's quite obvious this will be an open ended device.

Yes, the Plod and local councils both stated they disagreed with the need for this code. But they will be the first to abuse it.

Recent history shows that much is inevitable.

Anyone remember, back in the 1980s and early-90s, when councils paid officials a king's ransom in overtime to crack down on shops guilty of the heinous crime of Sunday trading? At the time they claimed they didn't like to do it but they had a duty to uphold the law.

Today's councils (...sorry, Local Authorities) see themselves as mini-governments. They love power, and any powers granted to them are always feverously scrutinised to see how far they can legally be stretched.

As far as I'm aware the new 'code' still has an extra chapter deliberately left blank for Local Authorities to insert whatever daft conditions they choose to impose. Anything from no vertical drinking to a ban on swearing and making you display your prices in Urdu.

That's the nightmare scenario, an endless list of meddlesome local controls. Just when you think you've complied with them all the new set hits the welcome mat in a brown envelope.

Here's just one example of how councils abuse those powers already granted.

In a single night over Christmas an army of Wigan Council officials joined forces for a raid on more than 40 pubs. In a fiasco dubbed 'Operation Nightsafe' four teams backed by the plod attacked in waves between 7pm and 11pm under orders to nab smoking ban breakers and underage drinkers.

By the end of the night they had failed to find a single offender, not one. They must have felt completely gutted. In an effort to justify this travesty they released a statement claiming to have noted drinkers of 'questionable age' - i.e.

customers aged over-18 who they couldn't legally touch.

Undeterred the clip boards and tape measures came out in search of easy nicks. Ten premises were reported for not displaying their license summary correctly and three did not have a 'no smoking' warning on display. They also found one pub who's one-armed bandit paperwork was incorrect, six where drinkers could take their glasses outside, one had a fire exit locked and... perhaps you'd better sit down for this... six had inadequate hand washing facilities.

Inadequate hand washing facilities? Lock 'em up and throw away the key, I say.

I'm sure the hard pressed ratepayers of Wigan can sleep safer in their beds tonight but was all of this really necessary? The obvious answer should be a resounding 'No'. So why are they planning to repeat Operation Nightsafe throughout the year?

Because they can. That's all the justification they need.

The Police were once quite fair and even-handed in the way their various powers at their disposal were meted out. By the 1980s they were beginning to forget who pays them whilst blurring the thin blue lines between criminals and the general public.

In the new millennium we are all criminals now. Like the bewildered elderly grannie recently imprisoned for five hours in a windowless police cell for shouting at a council official.

Like a good friend of mine, arrested and forced to sign a police caution for threatening the vicious estate yobs who have 'targetted' her home for the last seven years.

Predictably there's talk of us all 'fighting' the new code.

Fight? This industry? Don't make me laugh! We're too busy fighting each other.

I've never known an industry more hellbent on collective suicide than our own. Three years ago we'd clawed our way back from two decades of gradual decline with The Publican reporting turnover about to hit a five-year-peak. Further growth was predicted until at least 2011. Pub numbers had strongly revived, increasing year-on-year since 2002.

Make no mistake pubs were back on the map with a bright and rosey future cascading ahead. We had it all in the palm of our hand.

Any other industry would have fought tooth and nail to protect that hard-won turnabout. Then in 2007, in the space of a few months, we just threw it away.

Instead of building on that remarkable achievement we shifted focus towards people and organisations who never used pubs and never will, some who hated pubs. Seduced by siren statistics and false promises of a new Eldorado we staked the entire pot on a doomed social experiment.

We lost touch with the customer, and we're still not listening.

The customer knows what's wrong with today's pubs. So does The City, along with the media. It's always there in any article or analysis.

From a Reuters market appraisal: "The [pub] sector, perceived to be a low-risk steady growth segment until two years ago, continues to face hurdles such as falling consumer footfall, impact of a smoking ban, political desire to control binge drinking and a reversal to higher value-added tax from the next year."

For three years now my oft repeated message has been a simple

one: YOU CANNOT pick and choose which rights, as a publican, you

are prepared to sacrifice.

We allowed the forces of Political Correctness to drive an evironmentally-friendly horse and cart through 500 years of tradition and park itself up in our pubs.

It's clear now we were being tested. As Deborah Arnott of ASH has since boasted neither Nu-Labour nor the health fascists thought they could get away with it. A strong and traditional trade such as ours wasn't gonna be pushed around by a pee-cee minority, were we?

Weren't we? A handful of publicans who tried to rebel were ridiculed and reviled from within our own ranks. 'New Breed'

failed to arrive, the tills stopped ringing and the bailiffs knocked as we eagerly looked forward to future gains like climate-change fanatics. The white flag went up without a shot being fired.

Any fool could see it wouldn't stop at that yet still we appease and bow low to those who want pubs wiped off the utopian map of Britain. The Government knows from experience this industry is a pushover ready to accept the most draconian dictat with little more than a whimper.

Yes, of course I realise you personally weren't to blame and probably didn't agree with the smoking ban legislation. But collectively we are all guilty. Through apathy, naivety and greed we have demonstrated a profound lack of unity.

The way I see it we've got two years at best to save this industry. Unless our act has come well and truly together by 2013 it'll be too little too late. By that time we'll have either come out as one voice fighting unashamedly or we'll have meekly accepted our fate.

So by 2016 we'll either be back on our uppers or standing on the graves of 30,000 pubs. Remember that number.

Pubs will survive but they won't be 'pubs' as we've known them.