The FishTank

Archive for July, 2009

The Great British Pub is dying, so they say. But is it? And if so is that death something to mourn, a positive sign of a citizenry less obsessed with drink than the tabloids would have us believe, or just more evidence of the pernicious rise of the supermarkets?
Britain is a country very much in love with its myths, and the myth of the pub as social hub is one such treasured falsehood, created by nostalgic stories of wartime Britain and perpetuated in the post-war soap operas like Coronation Street and Eastenders, which almost invariably focus on the pub as the centre of local life. The implication is that, without the pub, there would be no social cohesion and the Blitz community spirit would die. The truth, not unnaturally, is somewhat different. The war was, after all, a period in which the pub was in decline, a decline that had been going on since the turn of the nineteenth century. The war gave pubs a boost, particularly when they served as rallying points for volunteer groups or places for blitzed refugees to hide out, but this was not how pubs were seen before the war. In fact, if you look at the nineteenth century they were frequently seen as hotbeds of sedition, places where Marxists and Trotskyites would gather to plot the end of polite society. With the war giving pubs a relaunch, and the soaps popularising them, pub culture has been both rebranded and reinvigorated in the late twentieth century, but that’s not to say that their role is any more significant to society than it ever was.
Because people don’t, as the myth suggests, tend to create social circles at the pub. They go to the pub with an existing social circle (such as families, work colleagues or fellow students). Where social groups centre on a pub (as with rotary clubs and other charitable groups, for example) it is more often that the pub serves as a convenient venue than as a catalyst. The reason pubs work so well in this regard is not simply the presence of alcohol, but because historically pubs are more tolerant of customers who spend a significant amount of time on the premises without spending a great deal of money. The average fast food chain would undoubtedly try to eject people who were still ensconced an hour after their burger was consumed. In fact, in the eighteenth century, our coffee shops had a similar tolerance to those who lingered, creating a refuge for the great figures of the Enlightenment, people like Samuel Johnson. They gave us, for perhaps the only time in our history, something that approached continental cafe culture.
The lack of this ‘cafe culture’ is often decried as a sign of Britain’s unhealthy obsession with alcohol. It’s not even a recent accusation: Roman writers characterised the British as a people with an unhealthy obsession with beer. But whilst there always have been particularly British problems with what we now call binge drinkers – people who in Hogarth’s time might have peopled Gin Lane – the truth is that the Brits are not particularly heavy drinkers. Research suggests that Germany and Ireland consume vastly more beer per capita than Britain. And whilst France may prefer wine, in terms of units of alcohol, they consume about 50% more than we do. Even within Britain there are ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ areas, Scotland and Northern Ireland consume more per capita than London and the North East, which in turn consume vastly more than rural districts. The universal beer-fuelled collapse of society is little more than media invention.
The picture in regard to the decline of pubs is equally distorted. It’s easy to forget that it was less than ten years ago that people were complaining not of pubs closing, but of banks closing to become pubs and wine bars. Look around many of our urban centres and you will find a former bank that is now a Wetherspoons, a Yates or one of the other rising pub chains of the twenty-first century. The truth is that pub numbers hit a peak in the heady optimistic days of the early 2000’s and a decline is probably to be expected. That the pubs closing are not the ones that were opening is due to shifting trends. Heavily urban centres like the Medway Towns, for example, used to have a great many pubs that were basically terraced houses. These were extremely popular when a pub was a refuge for the working man to escape the family for a private drink, but they are too small for groups of social drinkers or dining families and have been declining for decades. In rural areas, by contrast, larger pubs which started as coaching inns have prospered by becoming, in effect, budget restaurants. In fact, some of the pub closures will be accounted for by those rural pubs which have gone all the way and now operate entirely as restaurants. People still go there, staff are still employed, but they have changed from a place to drink with some food to a place to eat with some drink. It’s hard to see why this should be a problem.
That’s not to say there aren’t some pubs which have less obvious reasons for their decline. Changes in population demographics mean that, whilst the population of the country has risen, some rural villages have depopulated; better communications mean that people may be given to travel rather than stick with a poorly-run or presented local; and changes in behaviour and technology mean that people don’t feel they have to go to the pub just because they want a cold drink. The availability of alcohol in supermarkets is not a cause of this but a symptom. The fact that you can get a can of beer with a widget that makes it similar to draught from your local and then keep it in your fridge creates a demand and the lower overheads of selling in this manner means that people can enjoy a drink at home for less. Should we baulk at this? Would you complain that supermarkets sold cheap food because restaurants were closing? At the end of the day, it is not the duty of government to prop up businesses that are dying due to lack of public support, it is for those businesses to adapt in order to attract more custom. These are not public services.
That hasn’t stopped the pubs angling for change. Go into your local and you will no doubt find beer mats emblazoned with ‘axe the tax.’ Because this is what the pubs see as their panacea – the 33% that goes to the Exchequer with each pint sold. Would it help? Well, if you mean would it bring people back to failing pubs, probably not. The tax on beer may be levied on the consumer, but it’s unlikely that any pub would pass on the full cut. Their margins would increase, making them more profitable, but in terms of customer numbers the effects would be marginal. People who are attracted to cheap drink will still opt for the pub chains who discount heavily, those who are food oriented will not change their habits based on the price of a drink. There is a case for arguing that some people stay away from the pub because they can’t afford it, but that’s an issue about overall taxation. Cutting beer tax in preference to, say, income tax would hardly send a positive message.
And what about supermarket loss-leading? Should supermarkets be bound by legislation to prevent them selling at below cost? If so, why shouldn’t the bigger pub chains be similarly bound? There is a myth operating here: supermarkets do not sell loss leaders out of the goodness of their hearts or because they want people to buy lots of a particular product. They don’t even do so to buy loyalty – customers are notoriously fickle and just as likely to shift their custom as the stores shift their prices. Supermarket loss-leaders are an economic decision based on the idea that most people buying a loss-leader will go on to buy other, more expensive items at the same time. Yes, some people will just buy the alcohol, but with the loyalty card data they collect supermarkets know this is not generally what happens. Most people who buy cheap alcohol from supermarkets do so as part of a larger shop. The alcohol might draw them in or it might be something they pick up anyway (hard to work that out purely from sales data) but the end result is they were there for more than just the drinks. This means that unless pubs start selling barbeque equipment or groceries the supermarket will remain more convenient and price rises are more likely to lead to a decrease in overhaul alcohol purchasing than an ancilliary trip to the pub.
Alcohol purchased in supermarkets is symptomatic of that behavioural shift again. People do not, for the most, drink simply for its own sake. They want to drink with a meal or whilst they watch the match. Those pubs which have identified these elements, the gastro-pubs or the sporting pubs with the big-screen televisions, are doing well. Family-friendly venues with children’s play facilities are also enduringly popular. There may be other markets to explore – perhaps twenty-four hour drinking could allow for a general election night special where people gather to have a few drinks and snacks and watch the Government get a drubbing – but doing nothing and expecting government action to prop up the local is not the answer. The ideas are there for innovative businesses to find.
In the end, pubs are neither the lifeblood of our society or our economy. That they employ a great many people is because there are a great many of them, but that doesn’t mean government should act to keep them viable. In a recession there are always interest groups talking up their importance to garner government patronage. Some of them rightly get help, others wrongly so, but for pubs either individually or collectively to expect a bailout would be no more right than for Woolworths to have expected to be nationalised. Those who feel strongly that individual pubs should survive would do best to encourage custom themselves. If making the pub busier or more family-friendly makes it less attractive to the concerned individual perhaps they should ask themselves for which society they are hoping to save it.

With the last PMQ’s of the session over and done it’s interesting to reflect on what the last few weeks have shown us. After months of varying political tactics, David Cameron has, it appears, found a trick that works. To wit, he takes one government policy area – anything will do – and picks a single question that Brown doesn’t want to answer. Then he pursues it doggedly, typically using all of his questions to ask the same thing. Naturally, he doesn’t get an answer, but the next week he moves on to another question and begins the process again. Brown is unable either to parrot government statistics or to claim he is facing a lightweight who doesn’t want to talk policy. He fumbles, struggling to avoid answering the question, leaving press and public with the impression of a man who is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth.
Tactics are all very well, of course, but outside of the Westminster village why do they matter? They matter because, for the last few years, first Blair and then Brown have been using their own formulaic strategy for handling debate. In the early years they simply blamed everything on the Tories. It no longer washes, but they still had to say something. The most typical question asked of a failing government – other than in planted questions from their own side – is essentially why some area of policy is failing to improve the lives of a member’s constituents. Why is my hospital being forced to close wards? Why are my constituents’ children dying in Afghanistan? Why is law and order broken in my back yard?
To all of these Blair and Brown have one response. Not to answer the question, but first to trumpet how much money they have pumped into the relevant policy area – sometimes with specific figures for the constituency in question – and then to claim that this money was opposed by the questioner’s party. The money argument may have lost traction in the current recession, but the claim of opposing government policy still seems to have resonance.
And you might say that it isn’t unreasonable. After all, the Conservatives can hardly complain about ward closures if they were against extra investment in hospitals. They can’t complain about child poverty if they opposed SureStart. But that’s the trick: New Labour’s tactics are premised on the position that theirs is not only a policy that can deliver, but that it is the only policy that can deliver. The problem is not that the Conservatives had a different view on how to deal with terrorism, but that they opposed an extension to detention without charge. It’s a strategy that has been used for everything from NHS funding to 90 day detention, from the recession to the recovery, and it’s damaging our administration.
The reason this is damaging is that a government which takes this line cannot – without serious political damage – change their position. Blair used to say he had no reverse gear – not because he couldn’t think of another direction to go, but because he wouldn’t admit he’d gone in the wrong direction in the first place. Brown likewise cannot admit his failings as chancellor, despite the necessity of doing so in order to solve the problems he faces as Prime Minister. The my way or no way strategy may make for effective political grandstanding, but it’s absolutely lethal for policy. Governments need to be able to admit mistakes because – let’s be realistic – they always make them.
And it is this more than anything else that is causing Gordon Brown’s paralysis. After twelve years of failed policy, claiming all money thrown at a problem was, in and of itself, a solution, he has nowhere to go. To admit to reducing spending is to deny his previous claims that any such cuts would be disastorous to front-line spending, automatically closing schools and hospitals with every penny saved. He can try to rebrand his U-turns, making out that targets in schools were effective and that he’s scrapping them as the next part of an ordered plan, pretending that real-terms cuts are zero percent rises, but every such statement damages what little credibility he has and makes his career and that of his party that bit shorter. His only hope is that, somehow, circumstances will produce an economic miracle before the election. It’s woefully unrealistic, and with every week that Cameron picks apart one piece of his policy his stock sinks that little lower. From a possible hung parliament in 2007, he is now looking at what is potentially the end of Labour as a political force.
For us, of course, the war is far from over. Whoever takes up the reins after the next election we have to hope they will learn from the New Labour experience that politics is about more than despatch box strategy. We have to hope that Cameron, despite proving effective at opposition politics, concentrates more on policy than political tricks if he gains office. He’ll have a term of good grace if he hits the floor running, but he has to have proper answers ready when the questions come. If all the electorate hear is blame laid at the feet of the previous government, the cycle of political despair will simply begin all over again.

It’s not been a pretty week. Alleged political shows have been filled with more fake emotion than the average film awards ceremony, with faded celebrities – desperate to boost their public images – all adopting the same line in indignation and egocentric paranoia.
The story, of course, is the alleged bombshell of News of the World phone tapping. A practice which has surprised nobody exposed through a story which hasn’t been news since 2007. The Guardian and the BBC, along with an entourage of ‘oh, I remember her’ type celebrities are raking over the ashes in the hope of sparking a political funeral pyre for Andy Coulson and, through him, David Cameron. Why? You may ask. Although the reasons are various, underlying them is one word: desperation.
For the Guardian and the BBC the desperation is financial. Both organisations realise they stand to lose money under a Conservative Government: the BBC through David Cameron’s root and branch review of quangos, the Guardian through the announcement that its revenue stream of highly lucrative government job adverts will be going elsewhere. Scenting the loss of so much money, editors and overpaid political hacks alike are desperately blowing on the embers of the story in the vain hope of a spark. The BBC is aided in this by Andrew Neil, former Sunday Times editor, who presents two of the politics programmes making capital out of the subject. Neil, who has pretended scruples by pointing out his former attachment to the Murdoch press, appears to be attempting to settle old scores by taking a hatchet to his former employer. An employer from whom – if Wikipedia is to be believed – he departed under something of a cloud.
And if the motives of the journalists are suspect, those of the celebrities are even more dubious. The launch of a belated class-action suit against News International speaks of a financial opportunism that makes the MPs look positively humble. After all, there seems little doubt that the six figure settlement alleged to have been given a few years back is what has led to the goldrush now, and no doubt specialist solicitors are thinking about how much of that might come to them. The trouble, of course, is that big out of court settlements are only given when a newspaper wants to avoid fighting a case in which they are unsure of their facts and want to avoid the publicity. With the publicity already garnered and the celebrities clearly not aware of any damage up until this point, there’s very little for them to gain.
The two trundled out on Andrew Neil’s political shows are cases in point: Selina Scott, formerly a journalist herself, seemed to be somewhat confused about what the allegations were. Her attack on the News of the World for allegedly fabricating a story about her was all very well, but what’s it got to do with phone tapping? Why would the press pay someone to tap a phone and then make the story up anyway?
Vaness Feltz, meanwhile, played a case study in narcissim. There’s no evidence that her phone has been tapped, but she seems firmly convinced that the Press are so interested in her every move that they must have. After all, how would they have known when her daughter was in hospital that she would visit her? Quite. After all, it’s not as if the fact the child was in hospital would have been a tip-off. Or that the media could, just could, have been there ambulance chasing. Ego clearly plays a large part in all of this.
And that’s why public sympathy simply isn’t with the celebrities. The Daily Mash, running a satirical piece on the subject, made the point that the public don’t care how the press get their stories as long as they get them. It’s probably not entirely accurate, but when you have celebrities who have, when it suited them, courted press attention, possibly even revealed salacious details of their lives themselves, you can be forgiven for being less than sympathetic when it backfires. One has only to recall the farrago of the Douglas/Zeta-Jones wedding photographs to remember just how pathetic some of these people are.
All of which isn’t to condone the actions of the journalists involved. After all, when faced with someone who simply wishes to pursue a career in entertainment, why should they then be expected to spend every minute in the public eye? Why can’t their private lives be private? For most celebrities it is, of course: newsworthiness is not an automatic product of fame. Some play the papers for their own gain: for some it backfires, for others it provides little more than a brief period of popularity. There’s also the argument of the public’s right to know: public figures who preach standards they couldn’t possibly be practicing, or who expend vast amounts of effort trying to keep their expenses secret should not be surprised when the media start digging. Sometimes it is arguable that the media cannot get to the truth without breaking the law, particularly in instances where the police are involved.
It’s hard to legislate public interest, of course. There is a distinction between things that the public should know and things they merely wish to and it is unlikely this could ever be robustly enshrined in law. After all, would John Major’s affair with Edwina Currie really have mattered politically? Did David Blunkett’s pecadillos mean anything before he started bending the rules to please his partner?
What we can say is that the press should not be allowed to print lies or to use illegal methods to gather information on those with no government function. Some of this is already illegal, which is why the journalists in the News of the World scandal were tried and convicted. Measures to ensure newspapers can’t use big money to defend against libel suits and to ensure that retractions are given the same prominence as the original stories would go some way to redressing the rest of the balance.
And there it should end. Because, at the end of the day, this is a story several years old. The Guardian itself admits there is no new evidence in their story. That’s why the CPS won’t reopen the case, no matter how many innuendoes the BBC makes about miscarriages of justice. For journalists, politicians and celebrities to continue to pursue the matter, whether for financial or political gain is little more than rank hypocrisy. After all, what difference is there between pursuing a closed case with no new evidence and following a celebrity home after the interview has ended?

The totemic issue of the year to date has, without doubt, been the small matter of MPs expenses. The scandal has swamped the news, claimed the careers of dozens of MPs (no matter how many of them claim to be stepping down for family reasons) and caused one of the greatest upheavals in recent electoral history.
Over a month since the Telegraph began its revelations, however, the reform of the system seems to have been redacted from the political radar. Westminster has turned to other matters, seemingly content that the debate has moved on. But with the feeling still lingering amongst the public that MPs consider themselves a class apart, should something still be done? And should the expenses be the nettle that is grasped?
There is, of course, a balance to be struck. Whilst the public were (and indeed are) right to be angry at the way in which their money has been hijacked to give their representatives the good life, the sums involved have been fairly small in the grand scheme of things. Fred Goodwin’s pension they ain’t. And there is an oft overlooked distinction between those who have claimed for legitimate but petty expenses like scotch eggs and those who have actively defrauded the system by claiming on completely arbitrary houses or entirely fictitous mortgages. Yes, some of what is currently legimitately claimable shouldn’t be, but to argue that all expenses are bad and to axe them all, as seemed likely at the height of the furore, would be a reaction no better than simply letting things stay as they are.
In tackling the issue, however, we need to look not simply at the expenses themselves but at the more fundamental question. Why did it happen? If MPs do not, as they have repeatedly claimed, go into politics out of self-interest then, in comedian Jeremy Hardy’s words, what happens to them in that building?
The Jeremy Hardy quote was actually in reference to the Peter Hain donation scandal in 2008, but it seems equally relevant now. Talking about the subject on BBC’s News Quiz,the really telling phrase was when he said ‘I used to know him.’ A man he once regarded as a friend had become estranged.
Of course, the pair could simply have lost touch – we all lose a few contacts as we go through life – but with both being prominent and eminently contacable people this seems to be a matter rather more than simply a lost telephone number. What is more likely is that Peter Hain quite deliberately lost contact and allowed himself, like most politicians, to become a social isolate inside the Westminster bubble.
Because it’s important to remember politicians do, as a rule, start as ordinary people. Few of them have actually fought their way out of the slums, but most do start without the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths. They aren’t bred somewhere special. And this means that they start with the same kind of social circles as the rest of us; perhaps with more politicised close friends, but still with a smattering of normal people around them. Once elected, however, it’s easy to see how that can change: politicians have a similar problem to lottery winners – once in office, friends and relatives will see them as a path to their own personal aggrandizement; people who were once happy to stand them a pint or thirteen at the pub will suddenly start to prod them about why the tax on those pints are so high. And then there are the friends who, fun though they may be in ordinary life, risk causing political embarrassment if the tabloids find them out doing something embarrassing or speaking their mind as a friend of a noted MP. Politicians sever ties to protect themselves. They allow old friendships to lapse in order to safeguard their careers.
More importantly they also gain new friends. Their orbits change to encompass high-earning businessmen, journalists and – in the New Labour world – celebrities, all of whom live a life far removed from normal people. Surrounded by such a surfeit of wealth and influence, it’s no wonder that MPs suddenly see themselves as hard done by.
It’s also why they make some of their most blatant political mistakes. The sceptic might see the ten pence tax debacle as a calculated action based on pitching middle-class greed against working-class ignorance, but for the small amount of tax revenue it generated it seems too blatant a political risk – unless we allow for Gordon Brown being an even bigger fool than he outwardly seems. No, it makes much more sense if you see the issue through the eyes of someone who has pretty much forgotten that ordinary people exist. MPs whine that they earn so little not because they think repeating the mantra will make it an article of faith for us all, but because they themselves really believe it. Genuinely poor people are, to them, an academic abstraction, a mere statistic – they don’t really exist.
So, if our MPs have left for Planet Rotschild, what can we do to bring them back down to Earth? You could go for a nice headline-grabbing initiative like anchoring MPs salaries to average earnings, but that probably wouldn’t have more than a short-term effect on our representatives’ emotional memories. No, what is needed is to ensure that MPs remain in touch with their electorate. I’ve suggested before that we cut back on pointless legislation. Doing this will give our MPs more free time, making them more or less a part-time legislature. They should use that time: far from dropping their second jobs, as Brown’s anti-Tory strategy insists, MPs should be actively encouraged – even forced – to fill their time with other roles.
Not convinced? Think about it. Brown has, in recent weeks, professed to a desire to be a teacher. Put aside your fears about him teaching his view of economics or history; if Brown spent time as a supply teacher, he might understand the problems of education; similarly if Harriet Harman put in some hours on a Tesco checkout, or in a bar, or any one of the other part-time jobs that many women do, she might understand the real reasons why they aren’t all queueing up to be MPs or bank bosses. Michael Portillo’s belated political awakening came, not when he lost his seat, but when he took on the role of a single parent for a reality television programme; Ian-Duncan Smith seems vastly more relevant now having spent eighteen months researching the real world for one of David Cameron’s policy reviews. We need our MPs to understand the real world, and the best way to do that is if they immerse themselves in it. They’ll even earn some extra cash, but – and this is significant – they’ll realise how little most people actually earn for what they do.
Where does that then leave the expenses? Should we maintain the status quo, secure in the knowledge that our MPs will learn the error of their ways? I think not. The expenses regime is not simply a problem because of the way it has been manipulated, it was purposefully built up to compensate MPs for what they saw as inadequate pay rises. But MPs are already paid three times the national average income; that they need us to pay for their every whim is clearly blatantly ludicrous. Take, as one example, food: how can being an MP make their food bills higher? Do MPs have to eat more?
Expenses should, like the MPs themselves, be adapted to fit in with the real world. How would a private company compensate an employee who had to travel with work? Would they buy him a second home? No. Would they clean his moat or build his duck island? Obviously not. They would pay travel, and per-diem rates for accomodation, and even that only when the employee had to travel more than a certain distance. Perhaps the regularity of parliamentary sessions means there’s an argument for providing dormitory accomodation – which is rare in business, but potentially cheaper to the taxpayer. But whatever approach is taken it must be based on the notion that expenses are just that, expenses – not a second income. Fundamentally, what our MPs need to learn is that they are there to serve us, not to line their own pockets. And that means they cannot be allowed to profit through the expenses scandal and they should get closer to reality to reconnect with their electorate.