The Pub Curmudgeon - Tit for tat
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It’s reported that a senior scientist advising the government has said that pubs or “other activities” in England may need to close to allow schools to reopen next month. ‘Prof Graham Medley told the BBC there may need to be a "trade-off", with the re-opening of schools seen as a "priority" for children's wellbeing.’
However, it’s hard to see how such a trade-off works in practice. It’s not as though there’s a fixed amount of infection going round, and if you make it easier for it to spread in one environment you have to make it more difficult in another completely unrelated one. Indeed it just comes across as vindictive. If there really was a problem, then why not just ban children and teachers from going to pubs?
If this did happen, it would be a kick in the teeth for a sector that has had to endure nearly four months of closure and even now is struggling to get back on its feet again. It is likely that many operators would reach the conclusion that there was no point in trying to run pubs when they were subject to capricious closures, and simply give up the ghost. And where would the money come from to pay for the business support and furloughing staff? Or would they simply be thrown to the wolves? It also wouldn’t sit well with the attempt to get people back into pubs and restaurants through the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme during August.
Pubs are often singled out by the media as an example of a business sector that is essentially frivolous and that, if need be, we could easily manage without. However, they are just part of the wider hospitality industry that also includes cafés, restaurants, coffee shops and hotels, and it is impossible to decouple them. Indeed many pubs do far more business selling meals than drinks. If it again became impossible to sit down and eat a meal outside the house, or stay anywhere else overnight, the economy would be put back into the deep freeze of the darkest days of the lockdown.
The government has been widely accused of taking a “whack-a-mole” approach to Covid, pursuing various half-baked, headline-grabbing policies while lacking any clear overall strategy. And the official Opposition cannot hold them to account when all they seem to want is more of the same, both more restrictions and more spending.
So far, people have generally responded to the various restrictions placed on them with a kind of resigned acceptance. However, key to all this is a feeling of hope that eventually there is light at the end of the tunnel. Things have, albeit painfully slowly, been relaxed. But if that process is put into reverse, resignation can all too easily turn to despair and then to anger. There is only so much people will put up with.
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