News Article Comments : Polarised views can’t help pubs

Remember that chant in Animal Farm — “four legs good, two legs bad”? Well, it’s becoming that heated and polarised in the pub trade these days.

And the pubcos are very clearly cast by some radical licensees as the ones with two legs.

The problem with this extremist approach is that it leaves no room open for negotiation. It’s a “we win — you lose” situation, and it brooks no opposing argument. You’re anti-pubco or you’re not, and if you’re not, you’re no friend of the licensee. Yet surely there’s still a place for win-win? There has to be.

The hard-liners who think differently have now turned on the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group and portrayed it as a poodle of the pubcos — and, therefore, an enemy to licensees. Such views informed a TV documentary last weekend, which suggested the APPBG’s report on community pubs was deeply flawed because it did not examine the effect the tie is having on the trade.

The makers of the report had clearly been so extensively briefed by the Fair