News Article Comments : If the tie goes, regionals suffer

Members of Parliament aren’t flavour of the month at present and you’d think they would engage their brains before opening their mouths and uttering total nonsense.

And yet there was one MP, in a brief debate on the tie, telling the Commons that “the tied house system should have gone out with the Corn Laws”.

How about a little historical accuracy? The tied house system didn’t exist at the time of the Corn Laws. An act of 1815 cut back on the import of corn in an attempt to help British farmers and to restrict the manufacture of gin, which was cheap and causing social havoc; one sign outside a London gin shop declared “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence”.

The Beer Act of 1830 was introduced to counter what MPs at the time thought were two evils: cheap gin and the power of licensing magistrates to control the supply of liquor. MPs wanted to break the stranglehold of the magistrates and encourage the consumption of healthy beer rather than gut-rot gin.

The act allowed any ho