Time well spent?

In an intensive campaign during June, Gwent police breath-tested no less than 20,772 motorists, of whom a mere 124, or 0.6%, gave positive results. One hopes the 20,648 innocent motorists who had the finger of suspicion pointed at them felt that their time had not been wasted and they had not in any sense been subject to police harassment.

Surely statistics like this underline the point that drink-driving is something that requires a targeted response rather than the mass intimidation of the law-abiding.

And it is interesting that the report says “most of the 20,722 people who took the breath test in the force area did so on a voluntary basis” – in other words, the police had no legal powers to insist on a test, but of course to refuse a “voluntary” test might well have adverse consequences.

Because of course the innocent have nothing to fear, do they?

Cheshire plain

I recently came across this blog of pub reviews in Cheshire, which sadly does not appear to have been updated for over a year. The review of the Three Greyhounds at Allostock is a classic of its kind. But it struck me how “samey” so many of the pubs in Cheshire are – all those rather bland, formulaic, knocked-through, food-led establishments. Given its rich architectural heritage, there are surprisingly few pubs of real character. Yes, there are the famous ones such as the Harrington Arms at Gawsworth and the White Lion at Barthomley, but after that you start to struggle a bit. I’m sure that many other counties, even those with a strong tourist appeal, have a far more distinctive and varied pub stock.

Perhaps a lot of this is to do with the fact that historically both Robinson’s and especially Greenalls – two companies known for an enthusiastic and often insensitive attitude to pub refurbishments – had large holdings of tied houses in the county. The proximity of large centres of population gave pubowners an incentive to do up their pubs to cater for an urban-based dining trade. Many years ago I used to go from time to time to the Boot at Willington, near Kelsall, then a tiny two-roomer in the middle of a row of sandstone cottages up the cul-de-sac of Boothsdale, with a quarry-tiled floor in the tap room and serving Greenalls’ beer on gravity. Sadly now knocked through into the rest of the row and just another open-plan dining pub. So it goes, I suppose.

Wind them up and watch them go

You certainly have to hand it to the owners of BrewDog for having a knack for simultaneously getting publicity for themselves and winding up the humourless killjoys of the anti-drink lobby. Their latest effort is Tokyo, an imperial stout weighing in at a mammoth 18.2% ABV, but at the same time priced at an eye-watering £9.99 for a 330ml bottle.

Rather predictably, Jack Law of Alcohol Focus Scotland (sounds like a fakecharity to me), frothed:

“This company is completely deluded if they think that an 18.2% abv beer will help solve Scotland's alcohol problems. It is utterly irresponsible to bring out a beer which is so strong at a time when Scotland is facing unprecedented levels of alcohol-related health and social harm. Just one bottle of this beer contains six units of alcohol - twice the recommended daily limit.”

Umm, Jack, how many alcohol units are in a 70cl bottle of whisky retailing for £9.99? Or, for that matter, in a 75cl bottle of 15% ABV Buckfast? And surely he should be welcoming a drink sold in the off-trade at £1.67 a unit, way above any proposed minimum alcohol price. It’s hard to see Tokyo taking the place of Tennent’s Super in the hands of Rab C. Nesbitt lookalikes stumbling around the streets of the Gorbals.

James Watt of BrewDog responded with a very good point:

“Mass-market, industrially-brewed lagers are so bland and tasteless that you are seduced into drinking a lot of them. We’ve been challenging people to drink less alcohol, and educating the palates of drinkers with progressive craft-brewed beers which have an amazing depth of flavour, body and character. The beers we make at BrewDog, including Tokyo, are providing a cure to binge beer-drinking.”

And Jack Law shouldn’t worry too much, as they’re only making a limited edition of 3,000 bottles.

The soul of England

There’s an impassioned piece by Simon Heffer in today’s Sunday Telegraph entitled The soul of England lives in the public house. While I agree with the general sentiment, I can’t help feeling that Simon Heffer is someone who romanticises pubs as part of Olde England but doesn’t actually spend very much time drinking in them.

More supermarket nonsense

42-year-old RAF squadron leader Mark Giles has been prevented from buying red wine at his local Sainsbury’s because he had his 17-year-old son with him. Obviously someone with a commendably low tolerance for such nonsense, he left his shopping where it was and walked out. He also pointed out later that it would be perfectly legal for him to take the wine home and give his son a glass of it. We have seen this kind of thing before, but what is even more appalling in this case is that no apology or mumbling about an “overzealous cashier” was forthcoming from Sainsbury’s. I doubt whether he’ll be shopping there again in a hurry.

Many parents would reasonably expect their children to help them put their supermarket shopping on the conveyor at the checkout, but it’s running a risk if they happen to handle a bottle of beer and then the whole transaction has to be abandoned.

It would be tempting if you knew a supermarket that applied such a ludicrous policy to take your child with you, buy a couple of hundred pounds’ worth of frozen stuff, and a single bottle of weak beer, and leave it all on the checkout if refused service.

Keeping it quiet

It is likely that over the coming years a major battleground of the anti-alcohol campaign will be potential restrictions on alcohol advertising and promotion. However, there is no convincing evidence that alcohol advertising either increases consumption or encourages young people to start drinking, as this excellent article from Basham and Luik explains.

Based on the empirical evidence, it is clear that the public health establishment’s claims about the effects of alcohol advertising are incorrect. Indeed, the weight of the evidence substantially argues against its assertions about alcohol advertising initiating drinking and increasing consumption and alcohol-related harm. Consequently, there is no public policy justification for measures to restrict or completely ban alcohol advertising that is directed to legal consumers.

Drinking alcohol is so closely interweaved into Western European society that even a total ban would be unlikely to make much difference to consumption patterns. Indeed, as they suggest, by making it seem a forbidden fruit and discouraging brand identification, bans on advertising and promotion could even serve to increase consumption.

Never too fat to preach

President Obama has come in for a lot of criticism for appointing a visibly overweight woman, Dr Regina Benjamin, to the post of US Surgeon General. You know, the official whose name appears on health warnings on cigarette packs. Marcia Angell, a lecturer at Harvard University Medical School, told ABC News: “At a time when a lot of public health concern is about the national epidemic of obesity, having a surgeon general who is noticeably overweight raises questions in people's minds.” Another critic was Dr Sarah Reed, who made a point of saying she kept her own BMI at 19, which is technically underweight. I bet she’s a barrel of laughs at a dinner party.

You have to wonder whether Dr Benjamin would have been appointed had she been a white male rather than an African-American woman. But no doubt her weight won’t stop her preaching to her fellow countrymen and women on how they should live their lives. And has Obama managed to completely stop smoking yet?

And of course, being clinically obese doesn’t stop our own Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, lecturing us on every subject under the sun, although he does seem to lay off it a bit when it comes to snouts in the trough.

A super opportunity?

Interesting news that InBev are considering selling off the Tennent’s beer brands and the associated Wellpark Brewery in Glasgow. They want to concentrate on international brands and divest those that only have a regional appeal. Now, Tennent’s is hardly the first name on the beer lover’s lips, but Tennent’s Lager, first brewed as early as 1885, still accounts for over half the Scottish lager market, and the notorious Tennent’s Super remains the tramp’s preferred route to oblivion. But it could be a unique opportunity for an ambitious entrepreneur to grab a substantial share of the British beer market. On the other hand, with the Scottish Government doing their utmost to put brewers and distillers out of business with their anti-drink crusade, it could be a poisoned chalice.

A farewell to pubs

Depressing, although scarcely surprising, news today from the British Beer & Pub Association that the rate of pub closures has now reached 52 a week, or 2,700 a year. And that’s a net figure, after taking account of all the new trendy box bars that have opened. The real figure of losses of proper pubs is more like 70 a week. The number of pubs in Britain – 70,000 not so many years ago – is now down below the 54,000 mark. This is no more than I have hinted at in previous posts such as here and here. It’s wishful thinking, though, to expect the current government to do anything about it, as they have made it abundantly clear that they couldn’t care less about pubs and seem to view them almost as a kind of health hazard.

This blog posting by the ever-eloquent Raedwald is a poignant reminder of what we are rapidly losing forever. A whole way of life is disappearing, and pubgoing is becoming a niche activity that is irrelevant to vast swathes of the community.

But some people still don’t seem to get it, and complacently go on about how it’s just the crappy keg pubs that are closing. Broadly speaking, it is, but they aren’t closing because they are crappy keg pubs, they are closing because the overall demand for pubs has dramatically declined. Obviously, in such a situation, it is the less appealing pubs that will go to the wall first, but in the past the market was healthy enough for these pubs to make a decent living. All too often, people who really should know better fail to draw a distinction between the factors dictating the overall size of the market, and the factors determining how trade is distributed within a shrinking market.

Never enough

Forty-five major drinks companies are planning to spend £100 million on a major publicity drive called The Campaign for Smarter Drinking in an attempt to encourage responsible drinking amongst the young. Fairly obviously, this is a response to the tide of (generally exaggerated or groundless) anti-drink sentiment we have seen over the past couple of years.

I have my doubts, though, as to what effect it will have. If anything, campaigns of this nature tend to moderate the behaviour of those who are already acting responsibly while doing little to affect those who are overdoing it.

Attitudes to drinking are driven more by social change than official campaigns. Over the years, pubs and bars have gone in and out of fashion with the young, and it’s very likely that in ten years time we’ll be wondering what all the fuss was about. I can see the malaise that is now affecting the mainstream pub trade eventually spreading to the weekend binge-drinking scene.

Predictably, though, anti-drink fakecharity Alcohol Concern have condemned the plan as not going far enough. Chief executive Don Shenker said: “This new initiative appears to be yet another example of the drinks industry trying desperately to avoid mandatory legislation to pass on health information to consumers.”

In reality, of course, these people, however reasonable they may sound, can never be appeased. They will never state an acceptable final position, and are really primarily concerned with the direction of travel. However much you give them, they will always want more. So long as the tide is flowing in an anti-drink direction, Shenker and his bansturbatory chums will be happy.

Voting with your feet

One argument often advanced in favour of the smoking ban was that the licensed trade dragged its feet in providing non-smoking areas. Now, I tend to believe that this is disingenuous, as nothing the licensed trade could have done short of imposing a 100% “voluntary” ban would in practice have dissuaded the antismoking lobby from going for the jugular. But I don’t think it’s true anyway – in fact, even pre-ban, the provision of non-smoking areas was far greater than the trade is usually given credit for. I’m not saying it covered a majority of pubs, but in most areas of the country there were a substantial number of places where you could go, if you so wished, and have a drink in a smoke-free environment.

Clearly it isn’t possible to get into a time machine to prove this point, but, for a start, every single Wetherspoon’s pub had a non-smoking area, so there was one in the centre of pretty much every substantial town. Some had even prematurely gone wholly non-smoking, although they stopped that policy as soon as they realised that trade in those pubs had fallen off a cliff. All of M&B’s Vintage Inns chain, including the March Hare in Cheadle Hulme, only allowed smoking in a small area near the bar. The Phoenix in Hazel Grove had gone wholly non-smoking (although it had no cask beer either). The Davenport Arms in Woodford had, following a consultation with customers, confined smoking to the tap room, while the Griffin in Heaton Mersey, an archetypal down-to-earth boozer and certainly no upmarket dining pub, had a non-smoking room of long standing. I could go on, but you get the point.

In the early days of CAMRA, there were large areas of the country where real ale was very hard to find and people had to, and did, travel a long way to drink it. If they were prepared to do that, then it was a lot easier, if you were sufficiently bothered, to find somewhere in the mid-2000s where you could drink in a non-smoking environment. The thing was, though, very few people were that bothered.

This was not the case with eating out, as there were enough people who actively preferred to eat in a non-smoking environment that, by 2005, the vast majority of food-oriented pubs were at least 50% non-smoking. There was a clear economic demand here, and without any legislation the market had evolved to cater for it. But when it came to just going out for a drink, the vast majority of people were either smokers, part of mixed groups of smokers and non-smokers, or not really too concerned about a smoky environment. Not that a lot of pubs were particularly smoky anyway. The antismokers, if they really did want to vote with their feet, could still enjoy a varied drinking experience by sticking to the pubs with non-smoking areas, which may have been predominantly food-oriented but, as I suggested before, included a fair smattering of traditional pubs as well. Perhaps if they had been able to do more to demonstrate a demand for non-smoking areas for drinkers, we might have some genuine choice now.

But instead we ended up getting a “solution” imposed by non-pubgoers on the pub trade for which there was no genuine demand within the trade, as the lack of non-smoking provision purely for drinkers showed. And the legacy in terms of the swathes of closed and deserted pubs is only too obvious. If you don’t like a particular state of affairs, and know that the market isn’t going to deliver your preferred solution as there is insufficient demand for it, it is all too easy to go crying to Nanny to remove choice and get it banned.

Game, boy?

In the local this lunchtime, and there was a kid of about five years old busy playing on a hand-held games machine, with all the associated beeping and warbling. Since when was this remotely acceptable in a pub? The old-school landlord would instantly have said "stop that now or you're out!"

Little wonder adult customers prefer the quiet and order of their own homes.

Jack the flapjack

You might have imagined that a flapjack was a fairly innocent item of oat-based confectionery, but apparently it is such a toxic substance that Dame Deirdre Hutton, retiring chairperson of the Food Standards Agency, believes it should be banned. It seems that it is so energy-dense in relation to its size that it is a positive invitation to obesity. She said, “I don’t think that supermarkets should be selling this very energy-driven food. We should be making low-calorie food the norm and anything that is high in fat should be niche.” Presumably she believes we should be more like cattle who have to spend all day chomping away because of the low level of nutrition contained in grass.

She goes on to say “stores should sell 90 per cent healthy food and 10 per cent unhealthy.” Setting aside how that is defined in the first place, surely supermarkets should be selling what their customers want to buy rather than what some Righteous health fascist thinks they should be eating. She probably thinks it would be a good thing too if pubs sold nine soft drinks for every alcoholic one, and is no doubt one of those who harks back to the days of rationing as a laudable public health initiative.

Another sort of smoke

I’ve recently been following an interesting debate on a web forum (unfortunately hidden behind a registration wall) on the subject of cannabis legalisation. Now, while this isn’t something of any personal interest to me, I’ve always thought a strong libertarian case could be made for it. However, the pro-cannabis lobby aren’t going to win many supporters amongst libertarian smokers and drinkers by constantly going about how dangerous tobacco and alcohol are in comparison with their drug of choice. I have often thought that, if cannabis was legalised and sold on a commercial basis, the very Guardianistas who currently express sympathy for liberalisation would be campaigning for it to be further taxed and restricted.

Realistically, given the current ban-everything climate, the chances of cannabis legalisation in my lifetime must be infinitesimal, and certainly much less than the chances of the smoking ban being amended. We’ll see the metrication of road signs and Britain joining the Euro first. And, given the current climate of legislative persecution and social opprobrium that tobacco smokers have to endure, despite tobacco being a legal product, maybe the cannabis legalisers should be careful what they wish for. Perhaps it is better for their favourite weed to be technically illegal, but widely tolerated and perceived as something a bit cool and alternative.

More papadums please!

“We should stick to what we do best: steak & chips and scampi & chips, carveries and home-cooked Sunday lunches. And we should leave the papadums to those who know how to make them,” says Mark Daniels on the Publican website. Now I have to say he couldn’t be more wrong. One of the biggest problems with pub food is that so many pubs have boxed themselves into a corner of being a kind of English ethnic restaurant, and there are vast swathes of international cuisine that they refuse to touch. This can only serve to perpetuate an old-fashioned, stodgy image of pubs to people who happily tuck in to all kinds of exotic cuisines at home and in restaurants.

Thirty years ago, many pubs were more imaginative and innovative with food than they are now, and there was more difference between their menu offers. As one of the comments says, why don’t pubs offer “Guest meals” alongside “Guest beers” – and that means something genuinely different, not just another variant on the same tired old theme on the specials board.