News Article Comments : Backs against the wall: Time to fight

A black week indeed for the trade. Pub closures accelerating. Beer prices rising. Downpours. Flooding. And with an economy still on its knees, absolutely no sign of any respite for desperate licensees everywhere.

When you throw in the deepening fears that alcohol regulation is about to get even tougher, it’s easy to get sucked into the trade’s favourite new conspiracy theory: namely, Government is delighted if pubs decline and fall because home drinking takes so much less policing and causes so much less mess.

That’s probably a bit too much paranoia, even for as awful a bunch of politicians as the current shower. But can you think of a single measure the Government’s taken in the past few years that has helped pubs? The 2005 Licensing Act was originally intended to free up the licensed trade and let it operate more entrepreneurially. As we know to our bitter cost, it got hijacked in committee by the Home Office and became instead an instrument of draconian control, which over-bearin