Tim Martin: time to sharpen our argument
About a decade ago, by accident, I became a spokesman for the campaign against the euro.
I had noticed that no major currency in the world was "owned" by more than one government. That is to say that a currency and a single government were two sides of the same coin.
A little investigation revealed that all previous attempts to create a common currency without a common government had collapsed after a decade or two. Indeed, Europe's experience with the exchange-rate mechanism, the predecessor of the euro, collapsed in ignominy in the early 1990s. A crucial point in this history is that a dozen years ago polls showed that the vast majority of
Britons assumed the euro was "inevitable" because the Government was in favour of it.
The Government has been "anti-pubs" for the past 10 years, but there is no reason why an anti-euro type campaign cannot win the day for
our industry.
Indeed, there have been encouraging signs, including the Axe the Tax campaign, of an articulate and united front in the vital areas of avoiding any more tax and regulations for pubs in the next few years.
There are two further related arguments that I think have not been articulated clearly enough by trade leaders and media in recent years. The first relates to binge drinking. An article in the Financial Times this week highlights the fact that beer consumption in pubs has fallen by 33% in the past 10 years, whereas the off-trade, primarily supermarkets, has grown volume by 44%.
If it is true that binge drinking has increased in the past 10 years, as most people believe, it follows that the Government should encourage alcohol consumption in pubs, where it is supervised, rather than putting people off pubs with taxes, regulations and penalties for licensees.
Although this may seem a simple and obvious point, it is not one that has been clearly made by trade leaders or the trade press — highlighting the benefits of supervised drinking in pubs is a massive argument in favour of the trade, which is impossible to contradict.
If supermarkets legally and properly sell alcohol, as most do, they cannot possibly control the behaviour of customers afterwards, but we can to a very significant degree. QED (quod erat demonstrandum).
Taxing problem
The second simple point for pubs and pub companies to highlight is the level of tax they pay.
As we've said before, JDW paid annual taxes, including VAT and excise duty, of more than £400m, about 10 times our net profit, and this applies more or less pro rata to all pubs.
Listed pub companies in particular, but also others, and individual pubs, should always highlight the amount of tax they pay in their results statements and elsewhere.
It's all very well to criticise pubs for the small minority of binge drinkers, but the huge taxes we pay are a major benefit to the economy.
Indeed, about 1,500 companies like Wetherspoon would pay for
all government expenditure — a whopping £600bn — so no one else would have to pay any tax of any kind at all!
Pubs cannot halt binge drinking in its tracks because it is a deep cultural issue (just watch how much people drink at weddings and birthday parties and during other celebrations, especially when they are not in pubs). However, we can control with great success the worst excesses in the majority of cases.
In summary, the pub industry and media have improved the argument in favour of on-trade consumption in recent months, but I believe a slight sharpening of the argument in the areas mentioned above will help to prevent us from becoming the sacrificial goats for many of society's ills, a position we have occupied during most of the tenure of the current Government.
