I've never had the pleasure of imbibing in an honest old British pub, at least not in Britain. A few years back, while I was working on the East Coast, my wife and I took the opportunity to fly to Dublin for a long weekend, and we did take an extensive tour of Irish pubs on that Friday and Saturday night, and it was amazingly fun. (I also drank a frankly shocking amount of Guinness, and I make no apologies for it.)
British pubs, though, are throwbacks to the days when the United Kingdom was still America, Original Recipe, and not the leftist swamp it is now. And now, thanks in part to another old British institution: The tax man.
One pub will close every day this year as Labour’s tax raid makes it “impossible to make a profit”, bosses have warned.
The British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) predicted that 378 pubs will shut across England, Wales and Scotland before the end of the year – up from 350 closures last year.
It will take pub numbers to their lowest level in a century, the BBPA warned.
The body, which represents the pub industry, attributed the expected jump in closures to cost pressures on landlords. Worryingly, it said that for every £3 spent on pints and food in a pub, £1 now went straight to the taxman.
So, the pubs are shelling out a third of their revenues, for... what?
The inestimable Nigel Farage, champion of traditional British culture (including pubs), had this to say:
Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, labelled it an “absolute tragedy”.
He added: “Every publican that I’ve spoken to – and I’ve visited nine over the weekend in Clacton, just to go and chat and see how they’re getting on – every single person says that the NIC rise has taken away their profit. Every single one.”
Of course, if the United Kingdom continues its current course of nearly unlimited immigration from the predominantly Muslim world, all this may become moot; Sharia law isn't friendly towards those who like the occasional pint. It may well become a case of beer today, gone tomorrow, and that's not ale right.
There's a strong argument to be made that the British taxpayers are not getting their money's worth out of this. Not the beer - the taxes. Taxing any business at all for a third of revenues is sure to crater any industry, and if British pubs are anything like American food service establishments, their profit margins are pretty narrow. It's baffling that the British government would seemingly try to deliberately crater this great old English tradition of hoisting the occasional pint.
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Guinness is better in Ireland, by the way. I never cared for stouts or much of any beer that looks like motor oil. I’ve had bottled Guinness and draft Guinness in the States and even in Japan (yes, really) and didn’t like it. But in Ireland… My first pull of Guinness was in the Temple Bar, a sort of tourist-trap pub but still a must-see on the south side of the Liffey, and it was great. Smooth, rich, lovely. The folks in Ireland are normally friendly, although quite a few of them don’t bother watching their language, and pub conversations can get a bit salty.
Clearly I'm going to have to find a reason to visit an old-style British pub before they're all gone. Nigel Farage, if I'm ever in the UK, I'll offer to buy you a pint in return for an hour's chat.
I would caution our British cousins to read G.K. Chesterton's "The Flying Inn" as an example of what could happen if you continue down this path. As Chesterton wrote:
If an angel out of heaven
Brings you other things to drink,
Thank him for his kind intentions,
Go and pour them down the sink.
This seems appropriate.