Hamish Champ: Confused logic?
There I was, thinking that the corporate side of the pub trade had dried up completely, and then along comes a private equity firm with an eye on some pubs Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) didn't want and WHAAAAAAAM!, job done.
Anyway, shortly after the announcement was made into my email inbox popped a press release from the GMB trade union.
It was a chilling warning to the several hundred staff working in the soon-to-be ex-M&B pubs that they should fear for their jobs, since the deal had been funded by a company run by two of the people behind the creation of Punch Taverns more than a dozen years ago. And look, the GMB said, at where that is now.
Its reaction, while predictable, is also understandable. Firstly, it is using the deal to fuel its 'We Hate Any Pubco, But We Especially Hate Punch Taverns' fire.
It is also doing what any trade union is designed to do, namely looking to defend its members from having the rug pulled from under them. And while there is nothing to suggest at this stage that job losses are on the cards, if those M&B employees don't happen to be GMB members, its logic continues, then they'd do well to join.
The GMB's missive got me thinking about some of the readers' comments that have been posted in response to stories on thepublican.com recently, some of which continue to blame some or all of the industry's ills on Messrs Blair, Brown, Mandelson, etc. The last Labour government, basically.
Such readers note with considerable anger the damage that 'socialism' has done to the country. They are angry about how the last government brought us to our knees, with its political correctness and its economic mismanagement. Some hope that with the Conservatives now being in power - sorry, the coalition government now being in power - things can only get better.
Yet these are the same people who in the next breath back a trade union's efforts to get stuck into the pub sector.
It is… puzzling, that people can throw their toys out of the pram about a government that was to all intents and purposes committed to social justice, and er, then go and embrace the very sort of organisation which helped shape such policies, simply because it shares their own abiding hatred of the pubco system. Strange bedfellows, to say the least.
There is nothing wrong with people in the pub game having strong political opinions. For example, brewers, especially some of the traditional family ones, are conservative with a whopping great 'C'. Not my political cup of tea, I'll grant you, but hey, it's a free country.
And many publicans, by their very nature self-employed, fiercely independent business types who have little or no truck with political interference in their everyday lives, often share such political affiliations.
So why do they support a trade union?
Perhaps I'm mistaken. Perhaps it's only left-wing licensees who back the GMB's attacks on the pub sector. Or perhaps those who support the union's stance - and who wouldn't dream of voting for a Labour government - have come to the conclusion that the GMB is one element of the labour movement they can stomach being a part of.
Just be careful one of your barstaff doesn't go and join the GMB and then complains to it that you aren't paying them enough for a shift on Saturday night. Now that would be confusing…
