Hi Rachael,

Your second posting on this forum, I'm sure all regular contributors will agree, is more than welcome - new contributors are always welcome - but well out of date as a premise. You need to get up to speed. Your criticism of publicans' spending too much time away from their business is very naive and might even be misunderstood as being a deliberately highly offensive remark.

You have no idea of what is really happening to this trade - right in front of you. The 'guys' whom you trivially accuse of spending too much time sitting in front of computers rather than running businesses ARE, actually, RUNNING their pubs already - they choose to FIND SOME of the PRECIOUS LITTLE TIME they have left out of their insanely busy working lives - supporting family and local communities; paying staff and Revenue bills, assessing vat liabilites, unblocking drains and plugging leaks; juggling all the other huge minutiae of running a pub business - they CHOOSE to find time, when knackered and worn out, to contribute to a debate that is far too long in coming - because THEY KNOW AND CARE ABOUT WHAT THEY ARE DOING and they know full well they are being ripped off rotten. And what's happening to them is all 'legal' and they don't want other people to get into the same mess they are in... as well as trying to force change which might, just MIGHT, save their own businesses, livelihoods and huge personal investments they have put into to this trade they love.

Your stats from other sectors of the economy are meaningless; there is NO comparison to be drawn. You're using figures which already undoubtedly includes pub failures - small businesses - as evidence that pubs aren't failing - and you certainly can't produce any reliable stats to prove your supposition that: "the business failure rate in the pub sector is significantly below the average for other sectors" because - you're wrong.

What's happening to the pub industry now is like what happens to the end of a glacier that's in retreat from climate change. It's been in some form of stable state for centuries then global warming comes along (the pubcos in case you can't follow) and huge chunks start falling off at the end and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

What's different here between global warming and the real world of pubs is that here is a body of people who ARE prepared to stand up to unassailable odds to try to save something precious. Who don't see the scale of the problem being so daunting they don't have a chance of making a difference. The people who take the effort and time to read and consider and post here are dedicated, hard working, intelligent, responsible people who understand what they are dealing with, who are prepared to make a stand for what is right. You show NO understanding of any of this in your trite observations.

The point missed entirely in your post is that although the tie is, in principle, a workable construct with a plausability that has given it legs - it has a terrible track record of not delivering what it promises: its past abuse led to the Beer Orders: pubcos and to where we are now; a fragmented industry where no one can trust, or be honest with, another; half of which is wilfully destroying itself in the form of private equity writ large as the custodian of our national tradition, clearly in the sole pursuit of shareholder return for the short term against another half that doesn't even really acknowledge the other half's existence except to wonder at the scale of discounts available to it (ignore the property value side for now) because the market is so skewed by the status quo... This industry truly is mental. Even before trying to figure out where all the 'trade bodies' fit in.

The simple reality is that there is NO plausible reason for the tie to remain in existence, any notion that the tie can have a good side has been proven a romantic fantasy because the custodians of the tie have applied wholesale massive abuse of their power to the detriment of ALL and got away with it until NOW.

You could do with doing some homework.