Someone asked "Isn't what he* announced today everything people have been asking for?"

*Farage

OPPORTUNISM IS THE PROBLEM

Well, what was announced today MIGHT be everything people have been asking for and THAT is the point. It's performative and totally unserious.

John, I appreciate the question: Britain doesn't take pubs seriously

What Reform and Farage have put out on pubs is late, opportunistic, and unserious. It’s another five-point plan bolted on after watching other politicians and newspapers do the same thing an, I'd be prepared to bet on this: looking at conversations on potential solutions between publicans online - they have no plausible grasp of how to implement it either. Nor does ANY party. THAT is my problem...

WE DO NOT TAKE PUBS SERIOUSLY IF WE DID WE WOULD NOT HAVE A PERMANENT PUBS CRISIS. People log into Protect Pubs and elsewhere just to confirm everything is as DIRE as groundhog day always is then off they go, reassured there is no hope, and make a cup of tea and watch riots on TV.

And that’s exactly the problem: Britain does not take pubs seriously. We bleat about them sentimentally while presiding over their destruction. CAMRA was founded in 1971. The book The Death of the English Pub was published in 1973. This conversation has been running for MORE THAN 50 YEARS. Nothing has structurally changed to stop closures. If anything, they are accelerating. The last Budget didn’t just continue a permanent pubs crisis – it turned it into an existential one.

I’ve spent 20 years campaigning to get pubs recognised for their social value. It’s left me broke, sidelined, mocked, called wanker, woke, unrealistic, a fantasist, a narcissist, even a conspiracy theorist by beer writers and, even, J Mark Dodds really hates pubs he is a proper #unt by the recently deceased widely respected and much loved Old Mudgie FFS. I’ve been blocked by various beer writers I've asked would you be interested to know more about why pubs are closing? Standard procedure: Block 'the self entitled Boomer'. Hounded, and ignored, it is PATHETIC. Just as licensees and their fate are ignored every day. This isn’t ego; it’s about the fact that the means of saving pubs in this country are miserably - woefully ineffective.

CAMRA_Official hasn’t managed to fix it. Protect Pubs was founded by CAMRA members to try to stimulate CAMRA to get its house in order at Official level THAT didn't work. Campaign for Campaign For Pubs broke away and set up to try. Six years later, here we are again PUBS are still closing everywhere AND now Independent Pub Alliance - IPA has set up...

We don’t even collect basic national data on how many communities have lost their last pub. That alone tells you how unserious this country is about the issue.

So when Reform turn up with a “plan for pubs”, it isn’t leadership – it’s performance. Same with the Telegraph’s “save the pubs”, the Mirror’s “save the pubs”, the Mail’s “save the pubs”. None of them are designed to save pubs. They’re designed to sell papers, harvest clicks, and win votes. It’s all theatre.
And here’s the most depressing part: every time I’ve asked people to help build something serious – not slogans, but structures – the answer is always “keep going”. Nobody ever gets off their arse to help. I understand why - I was a licensee, I know how hard life is - but let’s not pretend this is working.
This isn’t left or right. It’s not about parties. It’s about reality. Pubs are not being saved in meaningful numbers. The whole framework for doing so is failing. And if you say that out loud, you get shouted down.

That’s why we should be sceptical of Farage’s 'plan'. Not because it’s wrong in detail (they nicked it, they all do), but because it isn’t serious. They treat pubs like a prop in a culture war, not like the national social infrastructure they actually are.

And until Britain grows up and takes pubs seriously, pubs will keep disappearing.

Here’s the thing: Anyone doing basic homework on the pubs crisis hits a wall almost immediately:
Try finding a definitive answer to how many pubs have closed in the 53 years since CAMRA was founded in 1971. You can’t. You’ll find fragments, headlines, partial datasets, and competing definitions - but not a single, authoritative, continuously maintained, site-by-site record that a serious country would have.

Try finding out: 

How many communities have no pub at all

How many villages that had a pub now have none

How many housing estates lost theirs

How many pubs were sold into the hands of the “regulated pubcos” over time, and when, and in what volumes

A clear, agreed timeline linking ownership change → policy change → closure patterns → conversion to alternative use

Then try finding it set out plainly in one place - not as scattered academic papers with limited reach, not as vague industry commentary, not as pub nostalgia publishing - but as an evidenced public account of what happened to a major part of Britain’s civic infrastructure.

You can’t. No one can. NO ONE. And that is the evidence: The absence of evidence IS THE EVIDENCE.

Because this is what it happens when a country doesn’t take something seriously: it doesn’t measure it properly. It doesn’t track it. It doesn’t audit it. It doesn’t treat it as infrastructure with consequential social consequences. It treats it like leisure - something to sentimentalise, not something to govern. Oh another pub closed. They should have used it if they didn't want to use it. IT IS PATHETIC.
So when Farage and Reform UK turn up with a “plan for pubs”, it lands inside a vacuum that Britain itself created: we don’t have the shared facts because we never built the factual apparatus. The conversation stays infantilised - slogans, quick fixes, performative announcements - because nobody has done the grown-up work of establishing the baseline reality.

And into that vacuum, the pubcos have owned the narrative for decades.

A “pub company” is supposed to invest in pubs, develop them, run them well, train people, build trade. What the big financialised operators actually did was the opposite: they made other people carry the operational risk, loaded cost and complexity onto tenants, pushed simplistic “food-led” fixes without building the capability to deliver them, and then used failure - often engineered by the structure - as justification for disposal and alternative use. They didn’t organise renewal at scale. They organised churn.

Meanwhile, the human cost is written all over the country, even if the datasets aren’t: countless publicans bankrupted, families broken, communities left without a convening space, the state picking up the tab elsewhere — and we still refuse to connect the dots between pub loss and social harm. We talk about polarisation and loneliness as if they appeared out of nowhere, while we quietly remove one of the only mixed, cross-class, intergenerational spaces people had.

And the institutional proof that nobody takes this seriously is right there too: pubs are split across multiple government silos — licensing, planning, business rates, health, communities, heritage — with no single accountable steward. No national audit of “publess” communities. No authoritative long-run dataset that combines closures, conversions, ownership, and social impact. It’s unconscionable.
So when someone says, “Isn’t this what everyone wants?” No. It’s theatrical, it's drama. It’s clickbait politics. It’s a five-point plan dropped into a mess that has been allowed to fester for half a century without proper measurement, governance, or accountability.

I’ll round off with the blunt truth: This is, I don't know how to describe it, this is how vulture capitalism wins all the time, because it has the power, it has the narrative, it has the story, the victor wins all the time, the victims lose all the time, the victims are blamed all the time, the countless thousands of publicans have been put out of business, the families bankrupted, made homeless, the state picking up the tab, communities bereft, not having anywhere to convene anymore.

This is all the social harm and damage it's been doing to the country. Look how polarised the country is. The people who have promoted this neoliberal mind virus infected reality are the ones who cry about it most. The hypocrisy is mind-boggling. Politicians, people who work in government, people who work at business innovation and skills, people who work at Department of Trade. We've got five different departments responsible for pubs FFS. Britain doesn't take pubs seriously.

And DO NOT MENTION BREWING. THAT is another one.

Ask yourselves this question. Ask yourself why PUBS AND BEER are separate conversations at every level WHY are two things absolutely INSEPARABLE always kept separate when it comes to talking about pubs. Eh. Ask yourself that EVERYONE?

It's mind-blowing. It's so that I don't know what else to say.