The Pub Curmudgeon - Pointless petitions

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Nowadays, you can hardly log on to Facebook or Twitter without being asked to sign a petition in favour of something or other, whether on the Government website or sites such as change.org. Although this may give the impression that you’re doing something to change the world, in reality more often than not it is just a substitute for action that achieves nothing beyond producing a mild feeling of warmth.
Many of these petitions involve protests against the closure of pubs. To pick an example at random, here’s one about the closure and potential revelopment of the Crown Hotel at Worthington near Wigan, a former runner-up in CAMRA’s National Pub of the Year award. WhatPub suggests that the pub remains closed, but hasn’t so far been demolished.
But, to stand any chance of success, a petition must be addressed to a specific body, not just be a generalised howl of despair, and must be realistically achievable. If a pub operator has concluded that a pub is no longer profitable, are they really going to be convinced by two hundred names of people who hardly went in there anyway? And, while a council can refuse planning permission for conversion or redevelopment, they run the risk of ending up with an empty, mouldering building on their hands.
It still doesn’t seem to be properly appreciated that, over the past couple of decades, the demand for pubs as drinking places has collapsed, so it is not exactly surprising that so many have struggled and shut their doors. According to the website of the British Beer & Pub Association:

Beer sold in the on-trade in the UK (million barrels):
12 months to December 1997: 26.2
12 months to December 2007: 18.7
12 months to December 2016: 12.9

So, over 19 years, beer volumes have more than halved. They fell by 29% over the first ten years, then by 31% over the next nine. Looking at those figures, what is perhaps surprising is not that we’ve lost so many pubs, but that we’ve lost so few. Sadly, all too often, petitions against pub closures are nothing more than an exercise in railing against fate.
If communities want to preserve something that approximates to a traditional pub, they are increasingly going to have to stump up themselves rather than expecting a commercial operator to do it for them. It is significant that this year’s CAMRA National Pub of Year, the George & Dragon at Hudswell in North Yorkshire, is a community-owned pub. That’s something that’s going to become more and more common in the years to come.


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