I Don't know Which is More Depressing...

[miss_s_b]

The fact that one of the Milliblands has got headlines for jumping on the Save Our Pubs bandwagon that Greg Mullholland and other Lib Dems have been successfully piloting for years, or the fact that Mike Smithson, famed sage of politicalbetting.com thinks that my livelihood and the lifeblood of many communities (not just rural ones) is trivial and laughable.

OK, so Millibland's "bold" plans are nothing more than to appoint a minister for pubs, and not to do anything about the beer tie, or the stupid over-regularion of the market, or the ridiculously complicated duty regime (here's an idea: differential taxation on cask and bottle/can), or any of the other issues that plague my industry. But that does not mean that the issue is not a serious one, affecting not just the lives of barmaids, but the fabric of our communities.

To dismiss this as so much sausages is, I venture to suggest, slightly short-sighted of the seer.

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Comments

[andrewhickey.info]

Absolutely. I'm an antisocial teetotaler, and the only pub I ever enter is (whisper it) a 'spoons for the cheap food, but even I can see that if forty pubs a week are closing, that's two thousand small businesses a year going under, each of which has a staff of five? Ten? being put out of work too. Ten to twenty thousand people a year losing their jobs (and in the cases of landlords their homes and all their assets) is something the government *absolutely* needs to be looking at.
Not to mention things like it being better for society if people drink proper beer in a social environment with someone who'll cut them off if they get obnoxious rather than buying twenty cans of extra-strong horsepiss from Tesco and necking the lot on the streets...

I agree

[(Anonymous)]

This is indeed not so trivial.

Why people think that employment issues can be laughed at is beyond me.

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Voter