Mike Bennett: Binge-drinking and licensing reform

Related tags Daily mail

'Binge-drinking should have long ago been consigned to history' says industry commentator Mike Bennett on The Publican Newspaper's 30th Birthday.It...

'Binge-drinking should have long ago been consigned to history' says industry commentator Mike Bennett on The Publican Newspaper's 30th Birthday.

It will, of course, be quite dreadful. Terrible events will be visited upon us. Working folk will be drinking in pubs throughout the afternoon, the country will grind to a halt and there will probably be a plague of frogs thrown in for good measure. It will make Sodom and Gomorrah look like a meeting of the Temperence Society.

That was 1991 and the hysteria which, in some circles, greeted the government's decision to allow pubs to open all day from Monday to Saturday, later extended to Sundays, too. Now we're going to become even more free to drink - and eat - when we want. God help us.

For it is a truth universally acknowledged that when governments poke their noses into the licensed trade it turns out to be disastrous, pride in the detail of their work soon turning to prejudice against those it's supposed to assist. After all, look at the Monopolies & Mergers Commission inquiry of the late 1980s and its subsequent legislation - achieving diametrically the opposite effect intended or expected.

Certainly, publicans and their customers were done few favours by this ill thought-out measure. Lord "I'm minded to accept" Young believed that, by carving up the huge national tied estates, thousands of pubs would be trousered by the regionals, diluting enormously the power and influence of the monolithic brewers that owned them at a stroke. We know what really happened. Young inadvertently spawned the now equally monolithic pub-owning companies led by Enterprise and Punch. And who is producing and providing the vast majority of beer for these colossal businesses? You guessed it - the national brewers!

And yet... the notion that every new law must necessarily work against the best interests of the trade and the men and women who support it with their custom week in, week out, is palpably untrue.

I once went with my father to watch Scotland play England at Hampden (you could in those days). That evening we ventured into town for a beer and listened agog as the guv'nor called time at 9.50pm. We were even more alarmed at what happened next: a manic rush to the bar to purchase everything in sight, either to be consumed there and then or in the streets of Glasgow. Frankly, it was carnage - and it was going on every weekend of the year.

It was, as we later discovered, called the "10 o'clock swill", the precursor to binge-drinking. That's what happens when you force people into a time ghetto. Binge-drinking is the bastard son of ignorance and illiberalism, a deadly cocktail of parentage that should have long ago been consigned to history.

Now it has been - and still some are unhappy. The Daily Mail's disingenuous campaign against the new licensing law has more holes in it that a Swiss cheese but that hasn't stopped it being loudly proclaimed. But then, the Mail is a newspaper that would rather put the fear of God up its readers than tell them the truth.

We won't become a continental-style café society overnight - probably not even in my lifetime. But you have to start somewhere. The new dawn which breaks in late November this year will arrive because of legislation which isn't perfect, and which is certainly way too bureaucratic. But its heart is in the right place.

  • Mike Bennett has been a respected industry commentator for nearly 20 years.

Related topics Licensing law

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