The Last of England

The past three months have seen a deluge of policy proposals being floated that, either directly or indirectly, would be damaging to the pub trade. While it’s likely that most of these ideas will never be implemented, some of them will be, and the desired direction of travel is all too clear.

There is a well-known quotation from Hilaire Belloc, reproduced in the sidebar of this blog, that: “When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.” This has prompted this particularly apposite and poignant article from Madeline Grant entitled When the last pub calls last orders it will be the last of England. I don’t propose to reproduce it in full (although I can send you the text if you send me an e-mail), but this excerpt is especially relevant.

Yet even here there is a melancholy sense to the average pub that has lingered since Covid. A pincer movement of cultural changes – the death of lunchtime drinking, the rise of clean living – now coupled with a government of an obvious puritanical bent, has created a perfect storm for pub owners.

Courtesy of the Government and their like-minded pals in public health we have heard pitches for two-thirds-sized pints and shorter pub opening hours – all within the last week. Rachel Reeves is reportedly considering an alcohol duty hike to plug the famed £22 billion “black hole”. Before that proposed smoking bans in beer gardens prompted ire from landlords…

…Indeed, Sir Keir and his acolytes seem unable to grasp why anyone would frequent a pub at all, ignoring their important social purpose. People come there to gossip and to moan, to make jokes and let loose, for conviviality and companionship. None of those are things the Starmers and the Gwynnes of this world can understand.

Undoubtedly many government policies, in particular the smoking ban, have damaged the pub trade, but the reality is that it has been undone by long-term social change. Pubgoing was never a specific destination social event, it was a habit that was woven into the fabric of everyday life. As I wrote last year:

In the past, a lot of drinking in pubs was centred around ritual and routine, often linked to the workplace. But all those Friday lunchtime drinks with the office team, after-work unwinders, Sunday lunchtime sessions and “I always go out with Bill and Frank for a few on Friday night” are now much diminished if not virtually extinct. If you’re no longer going to the pub out of habit, but have to make a positive choice to do so, you may well decide not to bother.

Added to this, there has been a growing trend to stigmatise even the moderate consumption of alcohol in social settings, which inevitably reduces the range of occasions on which people will consider a visit to the pub.

Some commentators may make the point that specific pubs are thriving, but that doesn’t mean that they can be taken as an example for others to follow. Within an overall declining market, the effect will not be even across the board, and it’s entirely possible that some venues that happen to be particularly well-located, or that cater for a specific niche, will continue to do well.

Many pubs have turned to food to keep alive, and indeed food has always been an integral part of the pub scene. However, there comes a point where it becomes so dominant that the pub has ceased to fulfil its original function and has become to all intents and purposes a restaurant.

Some industry representatives are keen to point the finger of blame at the rise of the off-trade, but in reality that is just the other side of the coin of the social changes that have led to the decline of pubs. Any moves to impose further curbs on the off-trade are unlikely to bring a single extra customer back into pubs. Both camps should realise they have a common interest in opposing anti-alcohol Puritanism.

It’s probably apocalyptic to talk of pubs completely disappearing by 2084. There will remain some demand for them. But it is clear that the tide is currently running strongly against them, and any moves by the government to impose new restrictions on them are only going to accelerate this trend.

Every little bit of advice helps

The Daily Telegraph reports that Tesco are contemplating using data collected via Clubcards to issue health messages to shoppers:

Tesco could use Clubcard data to warn shoppers when they are buying too many unhealthy items, its chief executive has said. The boss of Britain’s biggest supermarket said he expected to use artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor how customers were shopping to help “nudge” people into making healthier choices.

Tesco’s Ken Murphy said: “I can see it nudging you, saying: ‘look, I’ve noticed over time that in your shopping basket your sodium salt content is 250pc of your daily recommended allowance. I would recommend you substitute this, this and this for lower sodium products to improve your heart health’.” He said this was “very simple stuff” which could “really improve people’s daily lives”.

Some people might welcome a little friendly advice along these lines, but many others will regard it as a somewhat sinister, Big Brother-like intrusion into their privacy. There is also the issue of needing to see each trolley-load in context. It’s entirely possible, for example, that someone might buy fresh food at a market, and only use the supermarket for packaged items, which could lead the algorithm to conclude they had an unhealthy lifestyle. And that slab of Madri might not be all for your own consumption. I doubt whether the shopper depicted in this cartoon strip would find favour…

I regularly shop at Tesco, and have had a Clubcard for many years. I recognise that it involves some sacrifice of privacy, but as long as the data is anonymised and it doesn’t trigger third-party advertising it’s a compromise I’m prepared to make. I get a voucher for a few quid every three months, and sometimes they send me coupons for money off things I actually buy.

However, they don’t really have a proper handle on my shopping habits. From time to time, they send me vouchers offering £6 off if I spend £40, but the big catch is that this excludes alcoholic drinks. Not that I buy nothing else, but my regular bill is nothing like that, and if I’m splashing out a bit at Christmas the odds are that I’ll want to include a nice bottle of wine or malt, possibly as a present for someone else.

More recently, they have started offering in-store discounts to Clubcard holders, including the multibuy offers such as four bottles of beer for £7. This comes across as a slightly unethical tactic to encourage people to sign up for Clubcards, but as long as I actually have one it works to my benefit.

However, I’ve thought in the past that if they started sending me discount coupons for vegetables, I would cut it up. What I choose to buy is none of their business, and delivering patronising lectures on my shopping habits would be completely unacceptable. If they introduce this system, and there isn’t the ability to opt out, then I would have to accept that my weekly shopping might cost me a bit more. Although I would probably then be motivated to regularly use Aldi or Lidl, who don’t bother with loyalty cards at all.

Another day, another ban

On the morning after the General Election result I posted this tweet, which I really should frame, as I fear it will become only too prophetic.

The previous government did not have a good record on issues of lifestyle restriction, but it seems as though, as I expected, their replacements are greatly quickening the pace. It seems that hardly a day goes by without some further ban or curb being proposed. First we had the plan to outlaw smoking in pub gardens, and last week we saw both a proposal to ban “junk food” advertising on TV before 9 pm – and entirely on social media – and to prevent pubs using glasses bearing the logos of beer brands.

These are both issues on which I have commented before, and I don’t really propose to waste my breath going over the same ground again and again. The “junk food” advertising ban will inevitably encompass many foods generally regarded as “healthy”, while the alcohol logo ban is part of a much wider plan to restrict alcohol marketing and publicity.

Some of the thinking behind this plans is exposed in this extract from a report recently quoted in this tweet by Christopher Snowdon:

Rather than being welcomed as valued partners in the national enterprise, the alcohol industry and much of the food industry will be branded as “Unhealthy Commodity Industries” which are seen as a pernicious influence on public life. They will be at best grudgingly tolerated and excluded from any voice in policy-making. Huge swathes of the economy, also extending to sectors such as tobacco, gambling, car manufacture, oil and much of travel, will be condemned as essentially undesirable. The Scotch whisky industry, who are often celebrated as Scotland’s biggest export earner, cannot be remotely happy with this framing. And pubs, as retailers of alcohol, will inevitably be lumped in as well.

You have to wonder what motivates people to take this joyless and restrictive approach. Are they completely unable to appreciate the pleasures that can be gained from consuming alcoholic drinks or food, let alone enjoying these activities in convivial company? As H. L. Mencken famously said, “A Puritan is someone who lives in mortal fear that somewhere, sometime, someone is enjoying himself.” It is worth reproducing in full this well-known quote from C. S. Lewis, which is usually only seen in abbreviated form:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

The final sentence is particularly important, as it underlines how this approach is essentially infantilising people rather than treating them as responsible adults who can be trusted to take charge of their own lives.

A sinking craft

Over the past decade or so there have been endless discussions around the subject of trying to define “craft beer”. Was it a question of the style of the beer, the nature of the ingredients, the size of the plant making it, whether it was free from control of big corporations, the socio-political stance of the brewery? Or maybe some kind of intangible combination of all these factors. While it was often a case of “you know it when you see it”, it was impossible to pin down a watertight definition.

I recently came across an interesting blogpost from Jeff Alworth about how the concept of “craft beer” has effectively now become misleading and redundant.

“Craft beer” is a conceptual cul de sac. We started using it with good intentions, but with a naïveté about how brewing works and how markets function. It now causes more trouble than it’s worth. I don’t have any problem with the Brewers Association using the terms in their marketing—I certainly would if I were them—but we should recognize it for what it is. I encourage members of the media to consider using different language. It will make us all understand beer better.

He also says:

It is very important for both the health of a market and for the culture of beer to have small family breweries. They don’t have to cater to lowest common denominator tastes. They develop new styles and preserve old traditions from the ravages of industrialization. I am a giant fan of little breweries!

But they are just breweries. They just make beer. And, for what it’s worth, big breweries also just make beer. In using the “craft” framework, I think people got into the habit of thinking that what happened in large plants was some kind of industrial-scale chemical synthesis, not brewing. That was wrong as well, and led to other misconceptions.

Any attempt to arbitrarily sort breweries into sheep and goats is doomed to failure. If you deliberately choose only to drink beer from small breweries, or from breweries who take a particular public political stance, that’s up to you. But don’t pretend it’s actually anything to do with the nature of the beer in the glass. It’s all shades of grey rather than black and white.

It was often implied in the early days of CAMRA that real ale came from small artisanal breweries and was made from wholesome natural ingredients, whereas keg beer was made from chemicals in plants resembling oil refineries. It was an appealing myth, but that’s all it ever was, and exactly the same is true today.

It is also important to remember that there is a significant differences between the US and UK beer markets, which means that what applies to one doesn’t necessarily read across to the other. In the US, virtually all smaller independent breweries had disappeared, whereas in this country we still had a stratum of established family breweries together a newer real ale producing microbrewery sector. Indeed the basic premise of the British craft movement, at least at first, was that it was about interesting beer that wasn’t real ale. They presented themselves as primarily tilting against not the giant corporations, but “real ale culture”.

The US retains a number of substantial craft breweries that have grown up in recent years and comprise the leading members of the Brewers’ Association. By contrast, in this country, most of the leading brands that are considered craft are now owned by major corporates, with the exception of BrewDog, who in a sense have become more gamekeeper than poacher anyway.

I also get the impression in this country that the appreciation of craft beer became linked to a much greater degree to a specific social identity, giving rise to the characteristically British derision directed at the “craft wanker”. Of course many people who don’t conform to this stereotype do drink craft beer, just as you don’t need to have a beard and beer gut to enjoy real ale, but it has certainly established itself in the public consciousness.

Can a copy beat the original?

After a successful introduction in Ireland, Draught Guinness 0.0 is now being rolled out in Great Britain. Both in canned and draught form, it has been one of the most successful beer launches of all time, and Guinness have had to expand production capacity at their Dublin Brewery to meet demand.

One report complained that it was only 55p a pint cheaper than the standard version, but surely that is about the kind of saving you would expect from not paying duty and the VAT on duty. It doesn’t cost any less to make, and indeed may even cost more due to the processes required for de-alcoholisation. Drinkers of alcohol-free beers have no right to expect a subsidy for being virtuous.

I wrote about the canned version last year, and concluded that, while it was “a triumph of the brewing technologist’s skill”, there was something of a sense of expectations unfulfilled about the experience of drinking it.

Draught or canned Guinness is certainly a very distinctive product in terms of its appearance, mouthfeel and taste, and the canned zero-alcohol version does a pretty good job of replicating that. From its look, and the first gulp, it’s just like a glass of standard Guinness. It’s only as you get further down that you realise something is missing, and by the time you reach the bottom of the glass you’re left with something rather dull and forgettable.

You end up feeling rather like this unfortunate cat.

So successful has Guinness 0.0 been that they have been suggestions that, given time, it could overtake the original alcohol-containing product. However, I would suggest this is part of the excessive hype surrounding alcohol-free beer, and there are two key reasons why it’s vanishingly unlikely to happen.

The first is that, however good Guinness 0.0 is, it can only ever be a diminished echo of the original product. It only exists because standard Guinness exists, just as decaffeinated coffee exists because of normal coffee. There are entirely valid reasons why people, in some circumstances, might want to drink alcohol-free beers, but all they are doing is part-way replicating the experience of normal beer.

And, never having known what normal beer is like, it becomes something of a meaningless activity. Someone might drink alcohol-free beer to join in a social occasion with their boozing friends, but there will come a tipping point when they think “Hey, Bob’s now the only one of us who’s actually drinking. Why are we even doing this?”

The second is that, while it tends of be downplayed in marketing and writing about beer, the key reason people drink it is not so much because of taste or refreshment, but because it has an effect on you. Not so much getting drunk as a gentle warm feeling, a slight relaxation of inhibitions and a stimulant to conversation. It can be seen as a social lubricant.

Alcohol-free beer can never do this, and so its original promise is never fulfilled. People are never going to go on alcohol-free pub crawls, unless tagging along with drinkers, and nor are they going to seek out obscure examples of artisanal alcohol-free beers. There are connoisseurs of fine teas and coffees, but those are natural products, whereas alcohol-free beer is by definition highly processed.

There is no doubt some scope for further expansion of the alcohol-free beer market, but ultimately it will inevitably hit a ceiling.

As a complete aside, a good example of the copy overtaking the original is the TV sitcom “Allo! Allo!”, which was originally a parody of the serious drama “Secret Army”, but ended up far surpassing it in terms of longevity and viewing figures.

Something must be done

As I mentioned in my post about the pub garden smoking ban, the government are now also threatening the drinks industry with Minimum Unit Pricing (MUP). The headline is misleading, as the pub sector would, for now, be largely immune from this, but the intention is very clear. I have written about this at length over the years, mainly in the content of Scotland, where it was introduced in 2018. The conclusion, as set out in the Scottish government’s own report, was that it had done little or nothing to reduce problem drinking and had, as many of us had predicted, led to undesirable side-effects. The main underlying motivation for the policy seems to punish and denormalise ordinary, moderate drinkers by increasing the price of a modest, everyday pleasure. It has the same logic as increasing the price of petrol as a strategy to improve road safety.

It is disappointing that many in the pub trade seem to believe that MUP would be a desirable policy. However, under any scenario it would still leave off-trade drinks much cheaper than those in the on-trade, so the idea that it might prompt a switch in drinking habits does not stand up to analysis. Indeed it could be argued that it might harm pubs by squeezing household budgets and leaving them with less disposable income.

Their motivation seems to be more a case of wanting to spite the off-trade who they perceive as rivals. However, most people divide their drinking allegiance between the two depending on circumstances, so it isn’t a binary choice between one or the other. In reality, the enemy of both is the public health lobby. It’s rather like the communists and anarchists being at each other’s throats during the Spanish Civil War, which only served to benefit Franco.

Something that tends not to be appreciated is that MUP is actually a policy that plays into the hands of the off-trade, as it in effect allows them to operate a government-sanctioned price fixing ring, something that most businesses yearn for, but is generally outlawed by competition law. The price elasticity of alcoholic drinks is well below 1, so, while they may lose some sales, they will more than make up for it through fatter margins on the drinks they do sell. It will give them more incentive to promote the sale of alcoholic drinks, as they will generate more profit per square foot, and it may also give them the opportunity to raise the prices of premium products to maintain a differential. Because of this, the drinks industry in general tends to be fairly relaxed about it. The people it really does hurt are drinkers of modest means.

The government have demanded that the industry do more to “tackle the harms of drinking”. However, as long as alcohol is sold legally, some people are going to abuse it. The only way they can completely eliminate any responsibility is to stop producing and selling alcohol entirely. In recent years, the industry has promoted a number of initiatives aimed at reducing the harms of alcohol, including setting up the Portman Group to monitor irresponsible advertising, and DrinkAware to advise on health risks. It has also reduced the strength of a vast array of beers and ciders.

But, however, far you go, it will never be enough for Public Health, and they will always want to go further. Appeasement only results in further demands. Surely all that should be expected of alcohol producers is that they should meet all the legal requirements placed on them. If government wants them to do more, that must be clearly set out.

The relationship between government and drinks producers is also likely to change over time. Health groups have demanded that the government ban MPs from receiving gifts from firms involved in “tobacco, alcohol and junk food”. Notice who they’re lumped in with? In future, alcohol producers will be increasing regarded not as valued contributors to a successful economy, but as pariahs involved in a “toxic trade”, who simply have to do as they are told and have no right to be consulted or involved in decision-making. There is no point in alcohol producers arguing that they are different from tobacco manufacturers, when Public Health regard them as two sides of the same coin. And yes, craft brewers, that means you too. Much of that will also be applied to retailers of alcohol such as pubs, not just to producers.

I made the point back in 2020 that, despite a lot of negative publicity, the drinks industry has in fact over the past fourteen escaped relatively lightly from the tide of lifestyle regulation. The duty escalator was abandoned, duty has been frozen in some years, and never increased above the rate of inflation, and there have been no significant restrictions on advertising and promotion.

But that is likely to change in the coming years so, over and above the pub garden smoking ban, expect to see MUP, above-inflation duty rises, severe curbs on advertising and sponsorship, display restrictions in shops, further attempts to reduce beer and cider strengths, and maybe even plain packaging. Buckle up, folks, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!