Supporting pubs

For some 500 years now, alehouses have played a pivotal role within British public life. But now pubs are closing at the rate of 40 a week and we are haplessly bearing witness to an extraordinary process of cultural self-immolation. Around the corner from me, in Hornsey, North London, the Earl of Shaftesbury has recently shut its doors and, with it, not just a community drinking-hole but a deeper civic connection to a sense of place and past. Sir Liam Donaldson is not a little to blame for this: his ban on smoking in public places has driven drinking back into the home, where social safeguards are absent.

So what we really want from the Chief Medical Officer is not a one-size-fits-all tax on alcohol (which the Government is already suggesting it will not support) but specific policies to encourage more people to drink more beer in more pubs. That is called working with the grain, or yeast, of history.

As indeed we in UKIP suggest. Lower duty in traditional cask conditioned ales and the ability for a landlord to offer a well ventilated smoking room if they so wish.

Pretty simple, quick to do and would achieve the desired aim.

I know this is satire

But then satire can often reveal underlying truths:

As it was revealed that 2000 pubs have closed in the last year, non-pub goers said their community would not be the same without the local pub they never went to.

Margaret Gerving, from Peterborough, said: “I was delighted when the smoking ban came in because it meant I could finally go to the pub without being killed.

“But then I didn’t, mainly because I’m not the sort of person who likes going to pubs. I prefer to stay in with a carton of pomegranate juice and a bag of pine nuts and make long lists of all the things I want banned.

“Now it turns out that nobody else is going either because quite a lot of the people who used to go to the pub also liked to smoke. But none of this explains why all the pubs are closing down.”

For it is indeed true that pubs are closing all over the place and as least part of the reason is that those who like a smoke with their drink aren’t going to them any more.

As also aren’t those who don’t like to smoke and never went to the pubs in the first place.