Don’t you know there’s a war on?

Pubs in England have now been able to open for nine weeks, and during August the food-serving ones at least were buoyed by the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme. However, they have had to operate under a set of restrictions intended to curb the spread of coronavirus, reducing capacity due to the need for social distancing and imposing other requirements such as recording customer details and maintaining a heightened cleaning regime.

Licensees were given little notice of what was expected and had to improvise a system to deal with this at short notice. To be fair, most seem to have made a reasonable fist of it, coming up with something that meets the spirit of the guidelines while not making customers feel unwelcome. However, in some it seems to have unleashed their inner jobsworth, with restrictions being imposed that go well beyond what the guidelines imply, or are very poorly thought out, and which can have the effect of being very offputting to customers. As Victoria Bischoff wrote this week in the Daily Mail:

But some staff have taken to acting like self-appointed prison guards, barking orders at customers as though they are virus-ridden inconveniences. I’m sure they think they are helping to keep everyone safe. But if people are made to feel nervous and unwelcome, they’ll soon trade expensive rounds (£13.90 for a pint of Neck Oil and an Aperol Spritz in our local!) for a far cheaper glass of wine at home

As both I and other commenters have observed in the past, all too often pubs give the impression of having a sense of entitlement that the world owes them a living. Particularly after lockdown, they seem to assume that customers will be grateful they are open at all and will put up with all kinds of indignities. It’s on things like this where pubs benefit from being part of a large group so that someone in head office can look into it and come up with a coherent system rather than expecting everyone to make it up as they go along.

While I haven’t been in any other chain pubs, in general Wetherspoon’s seem to have made a pretty good job of it, actually improving the ambiance of their pubs by spacing out the tables and introducing partitions, and achieving the requirements of the guidelines without being too intrusive. But they still seem to struggle with organising queues at long bar counters that weren’t designed for it.

Some of the policies pubs have introduced arise simply out a lack of thought, but others clearly come across as deliberate. If you’ve decided to do away with beermats and ditch the charity boxes on the bar, if you’ve stopped taking cash payments and make everyone download an app to order, if you’re insisting on people making an advance booking just to have a drink, if you’ve festooned your pub with yellow tape and half-baked one-way systems, it’s not because the guidelines expect it, because they don’t. It’s because, deep down, you want to. And customers will remember where they were welcomed, and where they were treated like something the cat dragged in.

The systems most pubs have implemented to record customer details leave much to be desired. It wasn’t long before instances of systems being abused and the information collected being used to harass customers started to emerge. Any procedure that expects people to write down their details on a register that can be viewed by all and sundry obviously does not pass muster.

Indeed, very few of the systems I’ve seen meet the twin objectives of complying with GDPR (which is law, not just guidelines) and being accessible to people without smartphones. Again, the best I’ve seen is that operated by Wetherspoon’s, where you have the choice of either scanning a QR code or writing the information down on a slip that is then put into a box where nobody else can see what is on it.

Every little helps

There’s now only one day left to take advantage of the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme, which finishes next Bank Holiday Monday. This government-funded scheme, which has been running since the beginning of August, allows pubs, restaurants and cafés to offer a 50% discount on food and soft drinks (although not alcohol) on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, up to a maximum of £10 per transaction. So far it has proved extremely popular, with over 64 million meals being sold. Many venues have been fully booked and have had to turn customers away.

So I thought I would run a Twitter poll on how much use people had made of it. This was widely retweeted and attracted an impressive 786 votes.

POLL: Have you taken advantage of the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme?

— Pub Curmudgeon 🍻 (@oldmudgie) August 25, 2020

As you can see, it shows a U-shaped distribution, with the largest group not having taken advantage at all, but almost as many having made good use of it on more than one occasion. Indeed, one person replied that he had so far used it no less than sixteen times. The reasons for not using it at all included simply being too busy, being someone who didn’t eat out at all, and not thinking it worth abandoning their usual routine. Nobody stated that they were still too frightened to visit hospitality venues.

Obviously if it involves doing something outside your usual routine, many might not find the saving worthwhile, although others will see it as too good to refuse. Amongst other things, I’ve used it to have a couple of Wetherspoon’s steaks, which I don’t normally bother with, but are hard to resist at less than a fiver. While obviously sourced at a price, they’re actually considerably better than you might expect. On one occasion I added a couple of slices of black pudding for half of £1.05, but the other time they had run out. The way the bills are presented makes it difficult to work out exactly how the discount has been calculated, as the menu prices include a drink, but the value attributed to the alcoholic drink is certainly well below the full list price.

The complaint has been made that the scheme does virtually nothing to help pubs that do not sell food. However, realistically, for the government to subsidise half-price alcoholic drinks would have been a political non-starter. I also suspect that it would have generated surprisingly little additional trade apart from that shifted from other days in the week – as I have argued in the past, people are much more deterred from drinking in pubs by lack of opportunity than high prices as such. There may well be a case for additional targeted support for wet-led pubs, but surely the key to reviving their fortunes must be the general restoration of economic confidence and ending the climate of fear. And any government initiative to help the hospitality industry should be welcomed.

Eat Out to Help Out is of course a broad-brush scheme, and will pay for many meals that people would have eaten anyway, or that have been shifted from other days in the week. But there is no doubt that it has generated a lot of additional business overall, and one of the keys to its success has been its simplicity and lack of small print. It is giving specific support to a sector of the economy that was one of the worst hit by the lockdown and provides a large amount of relatively low-paid employment. Plus, going forward, it should help to allay many people’s fears the risk involved in visiting hospitality outlets and make them feel more comfortable about returning in the coming months.

And, if you’ve missed out, or you just can’t get enough, some pub operators such as Ember Inns are continuing it into September at their own expense. Although not, I suspect, Wetherspoon’s.

They say good things must come to an end, but we’re extending 50% off food and soft drinks until 9 September! That’s up to £10 off per person from Mon-Weds, so your local is calling your name 🍴

T&Cs apply. pic.twitter.com/T1178oQQD5

— Ember Inns (@EmberInns) August 26, 2020

Tempting bait

Sad news that the well-known Jolly Angler pub just off Manchester city centre, having reopened after lockdown, has announced it is to close at the end of the year. It’s a Hydes tied house dating back to 1854, tucked away behind Piccadilly Station in a warehouse district that is increasingly being turned over to new flats. While it was knocked through into one room in the 1980s, it remains a traditional proper pub of considerable character and has become something of a Manchester institution.

🧵 It’s with a heavy heart that we tell all our @TheJollyAngler regulars, new visitors and visitors still to come that we will be closing after Xmas this year. The building is sold and will not continue to operate as a pub. We are gutted but grateful we have a few more months.

— TheJollyAngler (@TheJollyAngler) August 15, 2020

Predictably, Hydes brewery have been accused of greed in selling out, but they are after all running a commercial business, not a preservation trust, and one assumes that they have received an offer they can’t refuse from a developer. It isn’t appropriate to draw a comparison with the noble railway arch craft brewers because they don’t have legacy estates of traditional urban pubs that they have to manage.

Over the years I’ve been very resistant to automatic knee-jerk opposition to pub closures. It has to be recognised that, for a variety of social and legislative reasons, the overall demand for pubs has greatly reduced in recent decades, and thus the total number that can trade profitably is much lower than it once was. In addition, many pubs have seen their trade dramatically decline due to changes in their local economy that have led to much lower footfall in the area. Many campaigns to save individual pubs are simply exercises in flogging a dead horse.

However, there are reasons beyond the sphere of economics why particular pubs may warrant preservation. One is that they are of such outstanding architectural merit, in terms of either exterior or interior, that they deserve to be kept. We don’t just allow the indiscriminate destruction of all the architectural jewels bequeathed to us by previous generations. This would cover pubs in Manchester such as the Peveril of Peak and the Wellington and Sinclair’s on Shambles Square.

And there are other pubs that, while they may not be so individually distinguished, contribute to the quality of the overall cityscape. Of course Manchester is not a historic showpiece such as York and Chester, but it would be greatly diminished if all its Victorian heritage was lost. There is no suggestion that the Jolly Angler is a failing business, merely that it does not fit into an overall development plan.

Yet it only occupies a small footprint, and surely it would be possible to create a new development around it, and indeed potentially become its centrepiece. Therefore the ball is firmly in the court of Manchester City Council in assessing the planning situation. The Central Manchester branch of CAMRA have started an online petition which is specifically addressed to Sir Richard Leese, the leader of the Council, and has already attracted over 1,000 signatures in just a couple of days. This states:

The Brewery say they have sold the building but we believe no planning application has been submitted to the City Council for demolition or change of use. If and when plans are submitted we believe it would be reasonably easy and the correct thing to do to accommodate the retention of this pub into any new development.

It should be remembered that a similar campaign a few years ago was successful in saving the Sir Ralph Abercromby pub near the Town Hall which was also threatened by the wrecking ball as part of a development scheme, so there is still all to play for.

However, it may well be that the Jolly Angler is saved by the bell. One of the most noticeable effects of the Covid crisis has been a severe reduction in economic activity in city centres caused by people working from home. There are many indication that this may prove, at least to some extent, to be a permanent shift in behaviour rather than a temporary adjustment. Therefore it could well turn out that the demand for city-centre office development, and for city-centre living, greatly reduces. After all, while obviously it had many unwelcome economic effects, many pubs were given a stay of execution by the 2008 financial crash.

Blame it on the boozer

Last week, it was announced that the British economy had contracted by no less than 20.4% between April and June this year, one of the worst figures of any major economy. That’s a fifth of the entire economy temporarily destroyed. However, much of the criticism of this performance was blunted by the fact that those making it had previously demanded an even stricter lockdown and a slower easing of restrictions, which comes across as an exercise in complete hypocrisy. As Kate Andrews says in this article:

...the decision to live in lockdown longer than other European countries, and with far tighter rules, has left us with our worst recession on record and the sharpest economic contraction since the Great Frost of 1709.

Given this, you might think that the media would be looking into ways of how to stimulate the economy and remove restrictions holding businesses back. But Sky News were having none of this, and decided to carry out an exposé on one sector that that only just been allowed to reopen and was still struggling to recover, namely pubs. They claim to have found that nine out of ten pubs were not asking for customer details, although it has to be said this completely contradicts my own experience, and in any case it is only a guideline, not a legal requirement. Several other bloggers have described finding very few pubs not taking the issue seriously on their own pub visits. And a survey by the Morning Advertiser found that 85% of respondents considered that pubs were meeting or exceeding the requirements.

It’s been widely observed that the Covid pandemic has encouraged every joyless Puritan and bansturbator to advance their own pet hobby-horses, and pubs are, not surprisingly, often in the firing line. Yet, while they’re often viewed as something that is frivolous and not really necessary, in reality they are only a part of the wider hospitality sector, which is the third largest segment of the economy and essential to our wider prosperity. Yes, it might be possible to distinguish drinking from other forms of eat-in catering, and in the Irish Republic you are still unable to just have a drink in a pub or bar although you have been able to eat a meal for nearly two months. But to do that would in practice be hard to define and would be a seriously retrograde step. Plus pubs sell more meals overall than either restaurants or cafés.

The government have given some demonstrable and welcome support for the hospitality sector with the Eat Out to Help Out scheme which is currently generating a fair amount of business that they wouldn’t otherwise get at all. But other parts of officialdom aren’t so sympathetic. There has been the long-running suggestion of shutting pubs to open schools, which are two things with only a tenuous connection. Council bosses have demanded more powers to shut non-compliant pubs. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? And the egregious, constantly whining mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has said that pubs may need to shut if contact tracing can’t be sorted out. So not exactly a great deal of love there. Pubs are always singled out as a scapegoat.

Several parts of England, including Greater Manchester, have implemented partial local lockdowns, although they haven’t included the general closure of pubs, much as some council leaders might want to have done that. The opening of pubs in Leicester was delayed due to a surge in infections which had been caused by inadequately regulated sweatshops and, by definition, as they hadn’t been open in the first place, was nothing to do with pubs. The basis for these lockdowns often appears very flimsy and seems to arise from nothing more than an increase in testing leading to an increase in the absolute number of cases.

In Scotland, in contrast, a local lockdown requiring the closure of all hospitality businesses was imposed in Aberdeen, and indeed remains in force today. This was then followed by turning the various guidelines on social distancing and contract tracing into legal requirements, and making pubs operate table service only, turn off all piped music, and mute any televisions, thus producing a pretty grim and joyless experience. No doubt the notorious Puritan John Knox would be pleased, although he might not be so happy that it had been imposed by a “monstrous regiment of women”.

As I’ve mentioned before, many people who claim to be beer and pub enthusiasts seem to have been distinctly lukewarm about the pubs actually reopening, as it means that they have to mingle with the dreaded hoi polloi again rather than sampling craft beers in the safety of their own homes. “After a couple of weeks we went into a beer garden, but we didn’t dare venture inside. And we thought some other customers were getting scarily close to each other and talking quite loudly.” Meanwhile, CAMRA has seemed keener on calling for financial support and staging cringey virtual events than actually kicking against the anti-pub climate and the possibility of further restrictions being imposed. But, as we know, they are always a complete paper tiger when it comes to confronting the public health lobby.

As Kate Andrews states in the article linked above, the government currently seems to be yo-yoing between wanting to stimulate the economy and being paralysed like a rabbit in the headlights by fear of a second wave. And worries about further lockdowns and travel restrictions is holding back people’s willingness to spend and make commitments.

As well as clarity, people also need confidence to start spending again: the reassurance both that they’re relatively safe from contracting the virus, and also that a sledgehammer won’t be taken to their lifestyle again.

The future of pubs is intimately tied up with that of the wider economy. Without a healthy economy, there won’t be a healthy hospitality trade. And indeed not only will it be a beneficiary of economic recovery, but one of the main drivers of it.

Only here for the pub?

I was recently reading a blogpost by Martin Taylor about the Hyde Park in St Neot’s, Huntingdonshire, and saw this comment that very much struck a chord with me.

25 years of trendy beers in “CAMRA” pubs and I suddenly find I prefer slumming it in scruffy market town boozers selling Doom Bar after seeing the joy in LAF’s posts.

“LAF” is Life After Football, who tends to write about pubs used by ordinary people that are never going to trouble the scorers for the Good Beer Guide.

This mirrors what I wrote ten years ago:

At heart I have to conclude I’m more fascinated by pubs than beer – by the variation in layout and architecture, the fittings from many different eras, the ebb and flow of trade, the little rituals and quirks of pub life, the mix of customers, their interaction with the bar staff and each other, the way their clientele and atmosphere reflect the varied strands of society. Every pub is different and has its own character and its own story to tell.

I first became interested in beer in the late 1970s, when the landscape was very different from today. There was effectively a finite number of draught beers available from a slowly diminishing number of long-established breweries. Although a few beers enjoyed wide distribution, in general to sample a variety of brews you would need to travel to different parts of the country and drink them in the tied houses of their own brewers, which of course added to the thrill of the chase. If you wanted to try Mitchells or Yates & Jackson, you would have to go to Lancaster or its environs.

Pubs as such were largely taken for granted, although it quickly became clear that they varied widely, with some being characterful and welcoming while others were blandly modern or offputtingly gimmicky. Sometimes you found yourself visiting a dreadful pub for that occasional rare beer, but in fact that was surprisingly rare. Some pubs were fascinatingly old and quaint, and some were wrecked by heavy-handed renovations, but nobody had yet seen the need for a National Inventory of historic interiors.

Before moving to the Stockport area in 1985, I never lived anywhere there was a wide choice of beers available on my doorstep. Therefore in each area, for your local pubgoing, you had to learn through trial and error (sometimes aided by the Good Beer Guide) to distinguish between the pubs available to you, both in terms of their atmosphere and the quality of their beer. It became evident that, broadly speaking, there was a correlation between the two, that better pubs kept their beer better.

However, slowly but surely, a fundamental change came about in the nature of beer enthusiasm, in that it became self-referential. Rather than taking an interest in something that existed anyway regardless of their presence, the market began to change to accommodate their desires, both in terms of the beers brewed and the venues in which they are sold. It is hard to think of any other field that attracts an enthusiast following where this has happened to anything like the same degree.

The first manifestation of this was the rise of the beer exhibition pub. Initially these were only showcasing beers not normally available in their local area, but they were specific venues targeted at beer enthusiasts, which took them out of the more mainstream pubs. This was followed by the steady rise of microbreweries, some of whom produced brilliant and eye-opening beer, but others came up with samey product that sometimes verged on dishwater. But it provided a lot more beers to sample, and gave rise to the phenomenon of the beer ticker. At the time they were derided by mainstream CAMRA members, but it seems that nowadays everyone has become a ticker.

Out of the microbrewery scene came the trend towards extremely pale and hoppy beers, and then in the current century the bewildering variety of flavours and styles, often at extreme strength, under the banner of craft beer. It all becomes impossible to keep up with and you find yourself wondering what is the point.

Some may respond by saying “life is very dull if you never try anything new”, but that is really a straw man. I’m certainly not resistant to trying new things, especially if they are new permanent beers from established brewers that I am likely to encounter on multiple occasions such as, a few years ago, Timothy Taylor’s Knowle Spring. But if it’s a case of something so odd or immensely strong that I’ll just say “Well, that as all very well, but I’m not going to make a habit of it”, then it seems a futile exercise, and to see the pursuit of novelty as the prime purpose of going to the pub is completely at odds with the reason the vast majority of people do it. The idea of spending a whole day in one town drinking Bass and Pedigree is anathema, let alone the prospect of an afternoon in an estate pub on Carling.

On the other hand, I’m certainly not averse to visiting unfamiliar pubs. During 2019, I went to 111 new pubs, which is good going considering that I’ve already had 40-odd years to work at it. Of course some are far better than others, but every pub visit has something of interest. It’s an endlessly rewarding quest. And even the familiar pubs that you have been to many times before have something different every time you go. So far this year, unfortunately, due to the fifteen-week closure, cancellation of holidays and continuing social distancing and travel restrictions, I’ve only managed ten, half of which were on one trip to Burton-on-Trent in March.

As I said in the post from 2010, locally I often choose to drink in Sam Smith’s pubs, not because I particularly value their beer above others available in the area, but because I appreciate what they offer in pub terms – comfortable seating, an absence of TV sport and piped music, a general lack of noisy children and, while some do sell food, never being put in a position of being the lone drinker in a wall-to-wall sea of diners. Plus all of the customers are there for what the pub has to offer rather than specifically being beer enthusiasts. While I prefer cask ale to keg, if these pubs dropped the cask I’d probably still go there for the same reasons, albeit perhaps a little less frequently. Fortunately, while they have converted a number of pubs to keg, that’s not a choice I’m forced to make in my local ones.

To many self-proclaimed beer enthusiasts nowadays, life is a constant quest for the new and unusual, and the greater the strength and the weirder the flavour the better. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, if that’s what takes your fancy, but it drives a wedge between them and the general population of pubgoers that certainly didn’t exist in the 1970s, and makes them ill-placed to represent the wider interests of pub operators and customers.

If it ain’t broke...

In the 1970s, financial journalist Patrick Hutber came up with Hutber’s Law, which was “Improvement means deterioration”. At the time, it was all too common for companies to announce improvements to their products or services that actually in important respects made them worse.

And that seems to be a principle often followed nowadays by tech companies. Every so often, all the major services that you use announce a new improved version. Inevitably, it’s initially confusing and hard to get used to. Eventually you work out how to do most of the things you used to be able to do, but there’s always something they seem to have forgotten, and it’s hard to see anything that’s actually better. Facebook was the most recent example of this.

And now the same has happened to the Google-owned platform Blogger, which hosts this blog and several others that I run. I’d known it was coming, but earlier this week I was taken aback when I logged on to create a new post on Closed Pubs and suddenly found I couldn’t do many of the things I was used to. And they certainly have past form in this respect.

One obvious change is that many verbal links to actions have been replaced by icons, some of which are far from self-explanatory. It’s also no longer possible to select multiple comments for approval or deletion.

This blogger is certainly far from impressed, and neither is this Twitter user:

Same here :-(
So slooow and half the functions I need are now either missing or practically unusable. I've managed to swap back to the legacy interface for now, but don't know how long I can avoid the new rubbish.

— Stephanie Jane (@Stephanie_Jne) August 4, 2020

Everyone uses these platforms in their own way, so one person’s experience isn’t necessarily typical of the general picture, and I’m sure I only use a limited subset of the features that are available. I tend to create posts in Word and then copy them into the composing window to add the final formatting touches and import any pictures.

There are two options for this – the HTML view and the Compose view. The latter ostensibly offers a WYSYWIG interface, but it can be very fiddly to set up items as you want them, and the end result still doesn’t necessarily reflect what you see on the screen. So, for the limited amount of formatting I want to do, mainly inserting pictures and links, I tend to prefer the HTML view, where you are at least in full control of how the final version will actually appear. But they have now dispensed with the options to import pictures and add links, meaning that the former have to be done through the Compose view and the latter require manual input of the necessary code. It can still be done, but it’s more time-consuming if your blog is anything more than a slab of plain text.

It’s not so bad as to be completely unusable, but it will certainly make creating new blogs in future a more time-consuming, fiddly and laborious and process. And for anyone wanting to set up a new blog, I certainly wouldn’t recommend they used Blogger to host it.

Edit: Another issue is that, on the blogroll of blogs such as Tandleman's, no thumbnail is displayed against posts created with the new editor, even if they contain images.

Tit for tat

It’s reported that a senior scientist advising the government has said that pubs or “other activities” in England may need to close to allow schools to reopen next month. ‘Prof Graham Medley told the BBC there may need to be a "trade-off", with the re-opening of schools seen as a "priority" for children's wellbeing.’

However, it’s hard to see how such a trade-off works in practice. It’s not as though there’s a fixed amount of infection going round, and if you make it easier for it to spread in one environment you have to make it more difficult in another completely unrelated one. Indeed it just comes across as vindictive. If there really was a problem, then why not just ban children and teachers from going to pubs?

If this did happen, it would be a kick in the teeth for a sector that has had to endure nearly four months of closure and even now is struggling to get back on its feet again. It is likely that many operators would reach the conclusion that there was no point in trying to run pubs when they were subject to capricious closures, and simply give up the ghost. And where would the money come from to pay for the business support and furloughing staff? Or would they simply be thrown to the wolves? It also wouldn’t sit well with the attempt to get people back into pubs and restaurants through the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme during August.

Pubs are often singled out by the media as an example of a business sector that is essentially frivolous and that, if need be, we could easily manage without. However, they are just part of the wider hospitality industry that also includes cafés, restaurants, coffee shops and hotels, and it is impossible to decouple them. Indeed many pubs do far more business selling meals than drinks. If it again became impossible to sit down and eat a meal outside the house, or stay anywhere else overnight, the economy would be put back into the deep freeze of the darkest days of the lockdown.

The government has been widely accused of taking a “whack-a-mole” approach to Covid, pursuing various half-baked, headline-grabbing policies while lacking any clear overall strategy. And the official Opposition cannot hold them to account when all they seem to want is more of the same, both more restrictions and more spending.

So far, people have generally responded to the various restrictions placed on them with a kind of resigned acceptance. However, key to all this is a feeling of hope that eventually there is light at the end of the tunnel. Things have, albeit painfully slowly, been relaxed. But if that process is put into reverse, resignation can all too easily turn to despair and then to anger. There is only so much people will put up with.

Junk policy

In an attempt to revive the hospitality trade, the government have announced an Eat Out to Help Out initiative, under which customers of pubs and restaurants will be able to get a 50% discount on food and soft drinks on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday. What a good idea, you might think. You could go out and enjoy some fish and chips, or roast lamb, or a cheddar ploughman’s, followed by some tiramisu or chocolate fudge cake. The only problem is that, apparently, the government don’t actually want you to eat any of those things. Under their proposed anti-obesity strategy, they’re all considered so bad for you that it won’t be possible to advertise them on television before the 9 pm watershed.

It seems that Boris Johnson has been spooked by his own brush with Covid, which has prompted him to adopt “Nanny State” policies that previously had been ruled out. I wrote about the possibility of this happening back in May, and concluded that “any ‘war on obesity’ started by the government will be largely ineffective, will get a lot of people’s backs up, and will create a whole raft of unintended and undesirable consequences.” it also seems particularly bad timing to impose new restrictions when hospitality businesses are already struggling.

It is presented as a crusade against “junk food”, but that is a nebulous concept for which it is impossible to come up with any hard-and-fast definition. In practice, it will to cover foods that are “high in fat, salt and sugar”, which in practice covers many items considered natural and wholesome. I wrote last year how a similar ban on advertising imposed by Transport for London had caught up in its net a company specialising in boxes of fairtrade products, who had had the temerity to include bacon and butter in a photograph. But they felt it was unfair on them rather than drawing a wider conclusion. The whole can of worms is set out in this paper (PDF donwload) from the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Fortunately it seems as though small independent businesses will be excluded, as including calorie counts on menus would place an unreasonable administrative burden on them. However, the clamour to bring them within its scope will be unlikely to relent, whatever the wider consequences. And the restrictions on what can be advertised will harm the revenue of already struggling media outlets.

The policy is effectively filleted with his usual aplomb by Christoper Snowdon in this article entitled Boris Johnson’s Absurd Nanny State Crusade:

Finally, it is at least pleasurable to think of all the headaches the government will now have as it tries to turn the dozy ideas of ‘public health’ fanatics into workable legislation. Most of the policies that Johnson is toying with have been dusted down from the fag end of the Cameron era. They were gathering dust for a good reason. They are not just illiberal and ineffective, they are impractical and illogical. Since there is no legal definition of ‘junk food’, the government will find itself in the same preposterous position as Transport for London, which had to ban adverts showing butter and jam last year and even had to censor its own promotional literature to remove images of popcorn and cream.

One of the few consolations is that we will be able to enjoy a lavish helping of Schadenfreude as the whole thing becomes tangled up in its own contradictions.

It’s gesture politics pure and simple, straight out of the “something must be done” school of public policy. But, sadly, it seems that whichever party you vote for, Public Health England always ends up in government. And the fact their sights have currently been trained on food doesn’t mean they won’t return to alcohol in future.

Hollowed out

Unexpected traumatic events often lead to major changes in behaviour and policy, some of which are temporary, while others prove to be permanent. However, at the time it can be difficult to tell which is which. Remember after 9/11 how people were saying that nobody would be building skyscrapers any more? Have you looked around central Manchester recently? On the other hand, nineteen years on, there are still severe restrictions on what you can take on to aircraft in your hand luggage.

Nearly three months ago I came up with a list of likely long-term changes that the Covid lockdown would bring about. I think all my points remain valid but, as I was essentially considering the impact on the licensed trade and the retail sector, something that I didn’t mention was the move from office-based to home working. Yet many commentators are now saying this may represent one of the most significant shifts in society that emerge from it, which will have many implications for the role of city centres.

It’s been widely observed that the recovery from the depths of the lockdown has had a somewhat Polo mint-shaped character. Many suburbs and smaller towns are not far off normal levels of activity, whereas city centres remain deathly quiet. There are various factors behind this. They are places where most of the footfall comes from people travelling in from outside rather than those living nearby. Non-essential shops were not allowed to reopen until the middle of June, which is only six weeks ago, and pubs, cafés and restaurants, which most people would see as an essential part of a shopping trip, came three weeks later. At the same time, compulsory face masks were imposed on public transport, which people are much more likely to use to reach city centres, while they will travel more locally by car. And forcing people to wear masks in shops will make that day out shopping in the West End even less appealing. Plus the level of tourism, both international and domestic, has fallen off a cliff, and tourist attractions are only just reopening.

But undoubtedly the move from office to home has been by far the single biggest factor driving this. This has often been foretold, but has never really happened, but this time it really does seem to be different. It suits employers, as they can potentially save a lot on office rents, and it suits employees, as they are able to avoid the daily grind and cost of commuting. The wider implications for how workplaces function are really beyond the remit of this blog, and it does have to be said that successful home working may be reliant to a large extent on the social capital previously built up in offices, and employees are likely eventually to feel isolated and miss the social aspects of office life. But it is likely that many employers will adopt a system of only expecting employees to come into the office for one or two days a week rather than five, which obviously will have a huge impact in the amount of office space required, and the number of people present at any one time in city centres.

This will have profound implications for major policy areas such as land use planning and the expansion of public transport capacity. It will also affect housing demand, as there will be less need to actually live close to your place of work. And it will impact on a wide range of businesses operating in city centres that service the work-based economy – cafés, restaurants, sandwich shops, convenience stores, dry cleaners, hairdressers and all kinds of general retail outlets that workers use in their lunch breaks or on their way to and from the office. Some of this demand will be taken up by businesses closer to where people live – after all, everybody has to eat – but some is likely to disappear entirely. Although written from an American perspective, this is a very relevant article about how the relative attractions of city and small town are changing.

And one area that is likely to be particularly affected is pubs and bars. Nowadays, the centres of large towns and cities are one of the few locations where pubs really thrive. While lunchtime drinking is now much more frowned upon, there remains a strong demand for the after-work pint, with the streets outside central London pubs often being crowded with drinkers in the early evening. Very often, city workers go on directly to evening activities rather than going home first. And pub visits are often prompted by a desire to meet up with colleagues, and people from other workplaces, outside the office environment. If everyone is isolated at home, the attractions of wandering down the local at six o’clock will be much less. That is, if you even have a local, while in city centres there are pubs to suit every taste. So the death, or at least the severe diminution, of office culture is likely to have a seismic, and largely negative, effect on the pub landscape.

Inching back to normality

It is now just over two weeks since pubs in England were allowed to reopen following the lockdown on July 4th, albeit under restrictions as to how they could operate. On reopening day, there were a handful of reports of minor outbreaks of disorder, but they were probably nothing more than would have happened on a normal Saturday, and were only newsworthy because of the long closure.

The general impression is that trade has been substantially down, with the Morning Advertiser reporting a figure of 40%. That is certainly borne out by my own experience of visiting a number of pubs. Obviously this is not necessarily representative of the overall pattern, but I’d say they varied between doing reasonable business and being extremely quiet.

With one exception, which is a very small place, none were up to their permitted seating capacity. This suggests that those pubs that decided they needed to require bookings for drinkers had been distinctly over-optimistic, apart from perhaps on the first weekend. Each pub has come up with its own interpretation of the guidelines, so you have to pick up the rules on each new visit. You are likely to be greeted with calls to sign a register or form, and to sanitise your hands using the cunningly concealed dispenser that you have just walked straight past.

I have only encountered one put that allocated me to a specific seat, and that was on reopening day – I suspect it may have been dropped since. I have also had no problem in paying with cash in any pub I have visited. I have been surprised that only half the pubs have made any attempt to ask me for contact details, given that so much concern was raised about this aspect beforehand. Maybe this is a good thing, given that evidence is already starting to emerge of contact information being abused.

Two of those that did were Wetherspoon’s, where the contract tracing forms are prominently displayed by the entrance, but customers are not put under any pressure to comp0lete them. In general, Wetherspoon’s seem to have done a good job of complying thoroughly with the guidelines without making their pubs unwelcoming. To my eye, their interiors have been improved and made more intimate by breaking up the wide open spaces through spreading the tables out and putting partitions up between them. Like other pubs, though, they seem to have struggled with organising a queuing system at long bar counters that weren’t designed for it.

One pub I visited had a portable screen that they placed at the bar to enable a customer to stand next to it, which seemed like a slightly tongue-in-cheek way of paying lip service to the rules. In general, the most convivial atmosphere has been in pubs that preserve separate rooms with bench seating around the walls, enabling customers to sit around the edge and carry on a conversation while still maintaining social distancing.

While there is no way of telling people’s relationship with each other, I got the impression that people from different households were meeting up in pubs and sitting together, showing that on the ground they are beginning to ignore the increasingly incomprehensible rules on exactly who can meet whom where and how far they’re supposed to stay apart.

Some pubs continued to provide beermats, either already out on the tables or handed to you individually with your drink, although the majority didn’t. This suggests that doing away with mats falls into the category of “something we can do to show we’re making an effort” rather than having any real justification.

In most cases, access to toilets was unhindered apart from signs reminding people to wash their hands and keep apart from one another. One pub, however, had instituted a single occupancy rule for each of the gents’ and ladies’, and in the gents’ had taped off the urinals, so only the single WC was available for use. You can’t help thinking that this is likely to cause problems if someone needs to use the trap for the purpose for which it was intended!

At least initially, beer quality was good, as you would expect when pubs were all tapping fresh casks, and most seemed to have made efforts to trim their beer ranges to match the expected lower level of demand. However, this is inevitably likely to fall off as the reduced customer numbers take their toll.

The atmosphere in the various pubs I have visited has varied considerably. Personally, I’m quite happy for pubs not to be too busy, and some of them are places I’m happy to spend time in. In others though, it feels as though there’s just a handful of drinkers rattling around in an oversized building, and in one or two certain aspects of their adjustments made me feel less than entirely at ease. Only one, though, was playing piped music at a volume loud enough to require raised voices, which goes against the guidelines.

The fears that restricted capacity due to social distancing requirements would be a major problem have proved largely unfounded, and the real issue is simply the lack of customers itself. I doubt whether many of the reopened pubs can genuinely say yet that they are trading profitably.

The prospects of pubs are very much tied up with wider economy, and until confidence is restored they will continue to struggle. This is especially true in city centres, where the continued high proportion of commuters working from home has led to a sharp fall in demand, not just for pubs, but for a whole range of other ancillary businesses. The government are facing the problem that it is one thing to create a climate of fear that causes people to curb their activities, but something else entirely to unwind it.

Stop all the clocks

CAMRA have stated their intention not to include any information on pub opening hours in the 2021 Good Beer Guide, which is due to be belatedly published at the end of October. The reasoning behind this is that, in the wake of the Covid lockdown, many pubs will be operating different or reduced hours and, given the impossibility of resurveying every pub, the information would thus be extremely unreliable. No details at all are arguably better than incorrect details. This is only planned to be a temporary measure, and the aim is to restore opening hours in the 2022 edition.

However, even inaccurate information does serve a purpose in a negative way by giving an indication of times when you can be pretty sure that a pub will not be open, and thus there is no point in trying to visit. It’s a fair bet that very few pubs will actually be opening longer hours than they did before. There are also many pubs, such as the Wetherspoon’s which make up about 5% of the entries, where the opening hours are firmly established and could be published without any risk of misleading readers. On the other hand, in my experience, the shorter and more unusual the hours that are advertised for a pub, the more likely they are not to adhere to them.

It’s airily said that if you’re concerned about whether a pub might be open, you can easily phone them to check. However, that shows a failure to appreciate the way many people use the Guide in practice. Rather than fixing on a specific pub and planning an expedition to visit it, they are much more likely to browse a range of entries in a town, or along a route, to see which might be worth a visit. If you find yourself in Borchester on a Monday night, you’re not going to phone round nine pubs to check whether they might be open. You’re much more likely just to go to Spoons, which you know will be open. And the information contained on pubs’ own websites and Facebook pages is notoriously inaccurate.

Some have suggested that CAMRA should simply abandon publication of the Guide this year, as the lockdown has brought about such a dramatic change in the pub landscape that it has become more a history book than something of current relevance. However, its unbroken publication over 45 years has become a key symbol of CAMRA’s efforts, and it would seem wrong to simply discard all the effort that has been put into it at ground level. Plus, in the current climate when income from beer festivals has completely dried up, the revenue is important for CAMRA’s finances.

There are cogent reasons why the decision has been taken, but the importance of reasonably accurate information on opening hours should not be understated. It will also inevitably lead some people to decide not to purchase the Guide due to the incompleteness of the information contained in it. And it will make life even more difficult for the dedicated band of tickers of GBG entries.

Maybe it would also make sense to drop the beer listings against each pub, which can be even more inaccurate than the opening hours. But at least it will bring to a temporary halt the interminable debate about whether or not to adopt the 24-hour clock!

Climate of fear

Earlier this week, the government announced, after much speculation, that they were going to require people to wear face coverings in shops in England from a week on Friday. This seems a somewhat bizarre decision, given that the virus has pretty much burnt itself out now, and people have been visiting shops right through the peak of the pandemic without them. In any case, many experts consider that masks are of very limited effectiveness.

The impression is very much that they have done this in response to public opinion, with many opinion polls showing a clear majority in favour of compulsory mask wearing. However, this isn’t borne out by people’s actual behaviour on the ground. From my observation, well below a quarter of supermarket customers are wearing masks. It seems that many people want the government to force them to do something they’re unwilling to do of their own volition. This is rather akin to those wealthy people who call for higher taxes, but never actually write out any cheques to HMRC themselves, which they’re perfectly entitled to do.

It’s important to note that the rules refer to “face coverings” rather than specifically to purpose-made masks, so it’s perfectly possible to use ones made from old scarves or T-shirts. How effective those will be is obviously highly questionable. No specification is given, so no objection could be raised to wearing the plague doctor costume shown above, or to flimsy items which were only intended as decorative costume adornments. On the other hand, the Welsh government has decided that all public transport passengers will be required to wear three-ply masks, which will need considerable skills in needlework if you want to make them yourself.

The way masks are actually worn also leaves much to be desired. In theory, the disposable ones that seem to be most popular are only supposed to be worn once. Take it off, for whatever reason, and you really should put a fresh one on. But how often is that going to be adhered to, especially since many of the mask zealots in the media keep telling us how easy it is to slip them off and on again? And how often are the home-made ones going to be washed in practice? Once a week if you’re lucky. Plus, the actual disposal of all the disposable masks is going to create an enormous waste problem. It’s also noticeable that all of them seem to have been made in China!

Many people have genuine medical reasons for being exempt from wearing a face covering. For example, experts have warned that people with asthma should not wear masks. But it is likely that they will have to endure bullying and harassment, both from staff and other customers, if they turn up at a shop without one. And many deaf people depend on lip-reading to communicate with others, and are going to be made to feel even more isolated.

People may well grudgingly put up with wearing a mask when nipping round the supermarket for essentials. But it makes going out shopping a much less enjoyable experience, and will act as a serious deterrent to more extended expeditions for leisure shopping, especially for clothing. A month after “non-essential” shops were allowed to reopen, High Streets are still seeing greatly reduced trade, and making shoppers wear masks is likely to bring any hopes of revival to a juddering halt.

Fortunately, so far pubs and restaurants have been excluded from the requirement, but what’s to guarantee that this won’t change in the future? After all, it has already happened in some Continental countries. After only just having reopened, and still struggling with reduced capacity, that would to deal a fresh body blow to the pub trade. Going to the pub is supposed to be an enjoyable leisure experience, not something you’re expected to grimly endure. And the blow to town centre shopping will have a further knock-on effect on pubs.

Some have argued that compulsory mask-wearing will encourage retail activity by instilling a greater sense of confidence, but surely human nature suggests it will have precisely the opposite effect. Far from representing any kind of return to normality, it will be an indicator of an ongoing climate of fear and anxiety.

No specific end date has been set for the measure, or any set of criteria against it will be judged. Indeed, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has stated that it may have to continue until a vaccine has been found, which could be never. As the great Milton Friedman said, “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program”. Remember that the afternoon closure of pubs, brought in as an emergency measure during the First World War, lasted over seventy years, and income tax, originally introduced to finance the Napoleonic Wars, is still with us.

A hike too far?

As pubs and pubgoers emerged blinking into the light after the long, grim months of the lockdown, they were confronted with a landscape that was unfamiliar in many ways. Most obvious were all the new social distancing and hygiene measures that had been introduced, and the widely varying interpretations that had been put on the guidelines.

More subtle were the changes to menus, beer ranges and prices that had been implemented. Wetherspoon’s, for example, seem to have increased beer prices by 10p a pint across the board, although it’s highly likely they would have done that in the Spring anyway. So John Smith’s Extra Smooth and Bud Light have now gone up in my local ones from £1.99 to £2.10, although Ruddles Best is still £1.79.

However, at first I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard what was happening in the Sam Smith’s empire, although this report from Middlesbrough seemed to confirm it. So I had to go along to one of my local ones to check it out on the ground, and in most respects the report proved correct, although I wasn’t expected to wear a face mask at the bar and both ladies’ and gents’ toilets were open as normal. Interestingly, I wasn’t asked for any contact details.

There had indeed been a swingeing increase across the board on beer prices, although it wasn’t a flat rate £1 a pint as some had suggested. The 2.8% beers – light and dark mild and Alpine lager - had increased from £1.40 to £2.20. Old Brewery Bitter had indeed gone up by £1 to £3.00, although they didn’t actually have any as apparently “none had been brewed yet”. Double Four Lager, also 4%, was also £3.00, where it had been £2.08 before. Extra Stout and Taddy Lager were now £3.40 as opposed to £2.30, and the premium Pure Brewed Lager had gone up from £3.00 to £4.20. The barmaid suggested to one or two customers that they could try an Alpine/Taddy split, which works out at 3.75% and sets you back £2.80.

It’s often hard to discern any considered strategy, or indeed sense, on pronouncements emanating from Tadcaster, and this will certainly test the patience and the budgets of many of their regular customers. On a personal level, I’m not particularly bothered, as I go there for the congenial atmosphere – comfortable seats, no piped music, TV sport or screaming kids – rather than the low prices. But if many of the other customers are deterred, much of that atmosphere will be lost, and indeed the future of the pubs themselves may be threatened.

The effect won’t be felt evenly across the board. In some of Sam’s Northern pubs in villages and prosperous suburbs, £2 a pint was effectively giving money away to customers who could comfortably, and willingly, afford more, and there may be little difference in the level of trade. Indeed, in such locations everywhere else nearby will still be considerably pricier. However, in some of their town and city centre pubs, and in some of the back street locals in and around Rochdale that Tandleman has been visiting on and off, there is undoubtedly a strong contingent of value drinkers who are likely to react against the price rises, either by transferring their business to Wetherspoon’s or by not coming out at all. Some town centres also have other value pubs that may see an opportunity.

While Wetherspoon’s are undoubtedly now much cheaper for cask beer and John Smith’s, this isn’t the case across their full beer range. Indeed the company in general succeeds in putting across an image of offering low prices that isn’t always borne out on the ground. For example, one of my local branches charges £3.05 for Carling and Foster’s, although the one nearest to the Sam’s pub is £2.69. Plus in Wetherspoon’s people end up sitting in solitary splendour on isolated tables rather than exchanging banter around a room lined with bench seating, and the management are likely to frown even more than normal on rearranging the furniture.

In general these increases will still leave Sam’s prices on a par with, or just below, those of their nearby competitors. It remains to be seen to what extent customers were there just for the cheapness as opposed to valuing other aspects of what the pubs provided. It’s not impossible that in the long term it may come to be seen as a necessary correction to prices that had become seriously out of kilter with the rest of the market and weren’t really bringing in that much extra trade. Or it could prove to be unhinged commercial suicide. Only time will tell.

It should also be remembered that Sam’s weren’t always known for their cheap prices. Going back a generation, they were on a par with the other family brewers. But a series of policy decisions in the present century have led to them overtaking Holt’s to offer by far the cheapest draught beer in tied houses. It’s certainly what Humphrey’s namesake on “Yes Minister” would call a “bold” experiment, and it will be interesting to see whether the policy holds, or whether there will be a reverse ferret once he finds some of his pubs completely devoid of customers. There is certainly a precedent for this in their backtracking on the Great Pie Fiasco.

(The photo shows a group of probable value drinking codgers in the Olde Blue Bell in Hull).

Edit: Tandleman has, entirely independently of me, discussed the same subject, and reached some of the same conclusions.

Where were you when I needed you?

Last week, I ran a Twitter poll on people’s attitudes to returning to the pub yesterday, the results of which are shown below. What is perhaps surprising, and disappointing, is that as many as 34%, from an audience presumably more favourably inclined towards pubs than the population at large, responded “Not for a long time”.

POLL: Will you be going to the pub on July 4th?

— Curmudgeon (@oldmudgie) June 30, 2020

Now, I would strongly defend everyone’s right to act according to their own conscience. But everyone must recognise that action, or inaction, has consequences. If you’re someone who never much cared for pubs in the first place, you can’t really be criticised for staying away now. But if you have professed support for pubs in the past, and you are under 60 in reasonable general health, you really need to consider your position.

While the death toll from the pandemic has been appalling and tragic, it has overwhelmingly affected the very old and those already in poor health. It has killed just 300 healthy people in the UK under the age of 60. The fatality rate has been 1 in 9,000 for under-65s, but 1 in 250 for over -65s. Now, when the rate of infection is greatly reduced, you are probably more likely to be killed crossing the road on your way to the pub than from contracting Covid-19 when you get there. To still stay away on the grounds that it is not safe represents a warped and exaggerated perception of risk.

The next few months are going to be a very trying time for the pub trade, with reduced capacity from social distancing and a lack of general consumer confidence combining to limit customer numbers. The rush of enthusiasm on reopening day is unlikely to be maintained for very long. Pubs will need all the support they can get. By all means make your own decision, but don’t then complain six months down the line when many of the pubs you used to enjoy are no longer there. More than ever before, “use ‘em or lose ‘em” is a critical message.

Apart from the over-caution, I was taken aback by the wave of rancid snobbery directed on social media at people who had ventured out to the pub. Just look at some of the responses to this tweet from a Manchester Evening News reporter:

I’ve spoken to regulars Chris and Jimmy. Jimmy hasn’t gone to bed after his night shift tarmacking the roads. He had a shower and came straight here. He described the taste of his first Carling as being like an ‘angel p***ing on the tip of his tongue’ @MENnewsdesk #citybacktolife pic.twitter.com/sUAKwlstwt

— Rebecca Day (@RebeccaDayMEN) July 4, 2020

Incidentally, the pub in question was the Shiredale in North Manchester. And, while some people said it appeared grim and uninviting, to my eye it very much looks like a Proper Pub. These responses prompted several people to man the barricades in defence of pubgoers, even though it wasn’t something they personally cared for.

I don't like pubs or beer. Just as you won't like some things that I do.
But if was able to I'd be down the first pub I could find ordering a pint just to stick two fingers up to those sneering at people who are so thrilled to be able to have a pint. Or two. Or more.

— Stephen Pollard (@stephenpollard) July 4, 2020

Many so-called beer enthusiasts who may in the past have given lip service to supporting pubs seem to have gleefully joined in with both of these tendencies. They may well have found they quite enjoyed staying at home during lockdown enjoying supplies of draft craft beer takeouts from their local micro bar, absolved of any need to actually go out and visit any pubs and mix with the dreaded hoi polloi.

Even worse than this were the snarky comments along the lines of “you won’t be saying that in two weeks’ time” which in effect is wishing illness and death on others.

Anyway, on a more pleasant note, the post title gives an excuse for another trip down memory lane with the Bangles. And Susanna Hoffs is five months older than me!

Keeping in touch

A week ago last Tuesday, the government confirmed that pubs in England would be allowed to reopen under certain conditions tomorrow, Saturday July 4th. Later in the day they issued the detailed guidance on how this was expected to work. I have deliberately avoided returning to this subject in the meantime because everything is speculation, and we won’t really know how it will turn out until it actually happens.

However, the point that has probably led to most discussion is contained on Page 11, where it says “You should assist this service by keeping a temporary record of your customers and visitors for 21 days, in a way that is manageable for your business, and assist NHS Test and Trace with requests for that data if needed.” Clearly, there is a strong justification for this, but it is something that has never been required of pubs before for walk-in customers, and the trade has spent the following week running around like headless chickens trying to come up with ways to implement it. It also creates serious privacy implications that should not be lightly dismissed.

Eventually, yesterday the official guidance on collecting customer details was produced, which is considerably more straightforward than many people had imagined. The key details are shown below. Note that it states “No additional information should be collected for this purpose”, so pubs will be going too far even to ask for addresses.

This is pretty much what Wetherspoon’s have said they will be doing. If some people write down Donald Cummings or Dominic Duck, so be it, but in reality I’d expect a high level of compliance, as making up a false identity is actually much more hard work than telling the truth. This little pad used by a German restaurant points the way, although even the address field is superfluous.

Compare this with the diktat issued by the Prince Albert pub in Wolverhampton, which goes well over the top. In particular, demanding to see “official” ID, except for purposes of age verification, seems completely unreasonable, as is demanding a temperature check and asking for date of birth. So I think my custom would probably go to the nearby Great Western, which is a far better pub anyway. In any case, I have no current photo ID.

On a related note, the various CAMRA branches in Greater Manchester have got together to produce a very useful one-page listing of which pubs and bars are expected to be open tomorrow and during the coming weeks, which is an extremely praiseworthy effort. You should be able to find somewhere to have a pint in most areas. In particular, local family brewers Joseph Holt are opening all but 13 of their pubs, as listed towards the bottom of this page.