Cameron criticises cider duty hikes

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/forum.ma/thread-for-post/73812

Steve Smith you can lay the blame for the disaster that is this pub industry firmly at the feet of the Tories. It's from little acorns do mighty oaks grow:

The wizard idea of breaking a monopoly with the Beer Orders unleashed the hounds of hell on pubs by creating a fertile breeding ground where the new invention of pubcos; totally unregulated and unfettered by the rules which applied to brewers, could divide, conquer and devour the whole pub trade like so many Great White sharks snacking on a school of Sprats.

With the decimation and emasculation of big brewers and the transfer of all power to pubcos, any voice any truly representative trade bodies had prior to the Beer Orders was silenced and supplanted by the ideologically compromised BBPA whose agenda was set by its funders - the pubcos.

The BBPA posed itself as the Voice of the Pub Trade to government while it has been nothing of the sort. Its agenda is to protect the unregulated feeding grounds its paymasters the pubcos so much need to sustain their unsustainable business model.

Politicians who make legislation, members of parliament and government ministers, are not experts in detail of every area they preside over, but they are brought up to speed on all matters by being given information from somewhere. They rely on trusted Policy Advisers who in turn rely on lobbyists for their own information about all things to do with all things.

The Labour administration has relied on BBPA for its information about the world of pubs. Any other administration would have been fed the same guff, it's likely that the same fragmented policy of the last decade and more would have been sprayed all over pubs no matter who had been in power.

It's like computer programming: ultimate outcomes are only as good as the input data. If you put crap in you get a lot of crap out.