A sentimental soul I know has a grim hobby. He photographs buildings that used to be functioning pubs. There’s plenty of material to work with, as the Campaign for Real Ale said earlier this year that 29 boozers a week close in Britain.
They leave a sad sight behind, especially if they still bear the hallmarks of a pub that struggle to shine through its reincarnation as a supermarket, takeaway, or apartment block.
The friend who takes these pictures does so to document and memorialise the importance that these hubs once enjoyed courtesy of their regulars.
And perhaps memorials is all that many pubs currently open can look forward to, thanks to a looming clobbering from the nimble minds of Government.
In April, business rates are set to rise for pubs. You might have missed this, because Rachel Reeves of Economist fame sold it as a win for hospitality, announcing 40% relief from the rates into the 2025/2026 fiscal year.
What that means in real terms, though, is that pubs will be among the businesses enjoying 35% less in relief (they currently enjoy 75%).
The Night Time Economy Adviser for Greater Manchester says this will mean that pubs need to sell 170 more pints every single day.
Hasn’t the pub, that noble British institution, suffered enough? Was it not satisfactory to the Labour Party that they hiked Employer National Insurance? You might have thought that a raging letter from Fuller’s warning Rachel Thieves that the tax rise would mean ruin for pubs might have forced a U-turn. It didn’t.
But why should we expect anything else from the class of morons who regularly run this country? It wasn’t long ago that the Conservative Party reckoned that an illness with a higher fatality age than the life expectancy of a British male was worth closing down the economy over.
And no, Keir Starmer, you don’t escape the blame for that either, because you spent your time in opposition demanding Boris Johnson lock down our economy — and the pubs that feed it — harder. If you’d have been in charge then, as you so regretfully are now, pubs would have had an ever steeper hill to climb once it was deigned that the citizens of the United Kingdom deserved to be able to lead normal lives.
This debate isn’t just about the economy, or business. It’s about the continuation of our culture. The drinking of alcohol has been a feature of these islands since the Bronze Age.
The sad slew of technocrats that now populate Parliament often seem to view drinking as dirty and the pubs in which we do it as nothing more than spaces teetering on the edge of violent disorder. What more is to be expected from the great unwashed? Especially those ingrates that were daft enough to prioritise sovereignty over freedom of movement.
Pubs, like football matches, are seen by these clinical killjoys as a problem to be managed when in actual fact they are so much more. They are our inheritance, gifted to us by the ancestors who got us here. They must be treasured so that we can steward them into the hands of future generations in order that our culture stays alive, even if that means that the Treasury can’t waste quite as much money as it wants.
