We need courage to fight the ideologues

It always ends in tears when Utopian individuals or movements get hell bent on changing our lifestyles because, according to them, it's good for us.

It's obvious our business is currently being subjected to such an attempt at change from a powerful and malign coalition consisting of central and local government and the health fascists.

Daily our trade is harassed by the swarms of their minions recruited to police it, further bloating an already bloated public sector dedicated to wasting taxpayers' money and aided by that most un-English of practices, the encouragement of Gestapo-style informers to shop licensees on the flimsiest of evidence.

This happened to the licensee of our Budvar UK local, but being what they used to call "a gentleman of spirit" he kicked back hard and got the local council jobsworths to apologise and got the nark's cover blown.

It's a pity that as an industry we don't show the same kind of courage, and when we do show any fight it tends to be among ourselves not against the real enemy. It never ceases to amaze me that we still chatter on about getting effective lobbying going when we know it to be, from past experience, an absolute waste of time. It's like the Kulaks deciding to lobby Joe Stalin.

Let's be clear, the people in power are out to skin us alive, and they don't care how many thousands of jobs that's going to cost, as long as their Utopian visions are realised.

They get away with it because we are a gentlemanly and rational people in this business and assume that our opponents are as well. Be warned — they are not. They are power-crazed ideologues who want to impose their miserable vision of the world on us all. They would abolish something that makes life worth living for many of us — and what for? To give us three more years in one of their squalid geriatric homes.

So far they have done away with smoking in pubs, doing the trade incalculable harm, now they want to put wet trade into a straitjacket. Where do they go next? My bet is that their next move will be to work towards making all pub grub vegetarian. When you think of it, it has to

be the reductio ad absurdum of the health fascists.

Now remember from your pub quiz who was the most infamous teetotal, non-smoking, vegetarian of all time. It tells you everything.

Tony Jennings is CEO of Budvar UK​