In the Labour Party’s official feed on X, in between the messages of good luck to the England football team and the promises that working people will be better off under Labour, is a staged photograph that shows a pub scene, and in the foreground is a blackboard on which would normally be written the daily specials.
Chalked on this board, however, is not the soup of the day, but the following message: “Under the Tories, 10 pubs have closed per week. Labour will give communities a new ‘Right to Buy’ shuttered pubs.”
It’s a powerful, direct statement of intent, and, having gone to the trouble of composing the picture, Labour obviously think it’s a vote-winning policy, including it as part of their appeal to Britain’s electorate for July’s general election.
Alongside immigration or tax, it’s not exactly a touchstone issue, but it has a populist flavour (it chimes in with The Sun’s “Save Our Sups” campaign) and gives some succour to those of us who have been engaged in the noble task of rescuing a pub as a community asset.
As long-suffering readers of this column may recall, I wrote at the beginning of the year about the plight of my nearest pub, which has now been closed for almost a year. The Fox in the Oxfordshire village of Middle Barton (predicted to turn Labour after years of being in David Cameron’s Conservative constituency) is the quintessential local pub, a small stone building devoid of pretension but with a long history – it goes back to the Middle Ages when it was the site of the village stocks – and a clear purpose (to serve a community of 1,000 houses).
In fact, so determined was the local populace to retain its only licensed premises that they set up a community trust, got the pub listed as an Asset of Community Value (thereby preventing its becoming a residential development) and raised more than £100,000 in an effort to purchase it. And that is still where we are, some six months later, in a position that rather makes a mockery of Labour’s electioneering pledge.
Our community has “the right to buy” The Fox Inn right now. There is nothing to stop us. Unfortunately, the owners of the pub don’t have “the obligation to sell”.
Labour has suggested that community groups will be given financial support from central government, and that business rates will be subject to a fairer system, which is to be welcomed, of course, but this ignores an important consideration: the vendors, often big companies with hundreds of establishments, must be willing to sell, and, also, to understand the role that a pub has in social cohesion and community focus.
That’s the problem we’ve had with The Fox. Its owners, Stonegate, in common with others in the hospitality business, expanded rapidly on the back of cheap debt to create a chain of 4,400 pubs. Now, they have a debt mountain of £2.2bn to service, and much more on their minds than to engage with a group of people who want to keep a small pub in the Cotswolds open. So for six months we haven’t been able to engage with them, and meanwhile the community is without an asset and the building is suffering further dilapidation.
This is just one example, but we know there are other such stories around the country. I don’t know whether Labour’s figures are right – 10 pubs closing each week – but anecdotal evidence would support a worrying trend, which is particularly noticeable in rural Britain.
Pubs are called “locals” for a reason: they serve a local clientele and play a part in community life. Labour is right to identify this as something that mobilises public opinion. But they could, and should, go further by putting pressure on the monolithic pub chains to do their bit to preserve this valuable feature of our cultural landscape.