Cheers! The local pub is back – which is where I’ll recover today from that grim panto of an election

AT LAST comes a glimmer of good news after the grim pantomime of mendacity and mudslinging that has filled the airwaves over the seeming eternity of the past six weeks.

It is news that should lift the spirits of everyone who cares as passionately as I do about the future of one of the greatest and most loved of all British institutions.

Don’t worry, I’m not talking about the election result or its implications for the NHS. As I write, with a hammering heart, polling stations are still open and I don’t yet know whether the suicidal turkeys among us have condemned themselves and the rest of us to the early Christmas of a Marxist-led government.

No, the institution I have in mind — with a stronger claim than most to be the envy of the world — is that powerful symbol of everything I love about this country, the good old British pub.

This week’s cheering news is that after years of precipitous decline, the number of pubs and bars opening in the UK has outstripped closures by 320 in 2019. So says an analysis of labour market figures from the Office for National Statistics, published by a Scottish start- up hospitality company, Stampede.

Revival

The study has found that England leads the way with the opening of a net 345 new watering holes — 85 of them in the NorthEast and 80 in the West Midlands. In the South East, which boasts more pubs than any other region (5,340, to be exact), the numbers rose by a more modest ten, and in Northern Ireland by only five.

True, it’s a different story in Scotland, which lost five pubs overall this year, and in Wales where numbers were down by 25. But even here, there is strong evidence that the rate of net closures is slowing sharply.

Could it be that after seven years in which the country’s total number of pubs and bars plunged by more than 13,500 — from 52,500 in 2001 to 38,815 in 2018, according to an ONS report published a year ago — we’re at last witnessing a revival in a trade that has been the hub of our communities for centuries?

Before we order celebratory drinks all round, I ought to record the study’s slightly depressing finding that most of the growth in the sector has sprung from large chains with turnover well above £500,000, such as J.D. Wetherspoon, while there has been a net closure of 55 pubs turning over less than £100,000.

Mind you, I’m not knocking Spoons, as my sons insist on calling it. Run by the swashbuckling Brexiteer Tim Martin, who has just announced plans to create 10,000 jobs, this highly successful enterprise boasts the great virtues of keeping its prices down and — even better for increasingly deaf oldies like me — enforcing a strict no-music policy.

But in my book, the perfect British pub is an altogether smaller-scale enterprise. It is run not by an ever-changing cast of managers on their way up the career ladder but by permanent fixtures in the community — landlords and landladies who have lived on the premises for years, know all the local gossip and are ready with their regulars’ preferred tipples, without having to be told (‘The usual, Tom?).

Indeed, as I may have written before, my idea of heaven on Earth is an English village pub — ideally at least a couple of centuries old, with a thatched roof and a low ceiling supported by gnarled oak beams. On winter evenings, there should be a blazing log fire to greet us (sorry, Greta Thunberg) and a labrador stretched out on the hearth (‘just taking the dog for a walk, dear’).

On summer afternoons, there will be trestle tables out at the front, from which customers can watch the cricket on the village green or just listen to the drone of the bees in the roses above the door.

But it’s the distinctive ethos of Britain’s pubs that matters far more than their appearance, and sets them apart from bars and cafes elsewhere in the world.

Therapeutic

To me, they are havens from the madness of political correctness that infects the broadcast media and the internet. They are places where we can escape for a precious hour or two from the thousand-and- one irritations of an increasingly bossy and humourless outside world, exchanging jokes or moaning about the foibles and failings of the opposite sex without risk of provoking a Twitterstorm.

Indeed, it’s no surprise to me that surveys have found visiting the pub has a strong therapeutic effect on mental and physical health, or that those who regularly pop down to the local tend to live longer than stay-at-home drinkers.

But more precious still, I reckon, is the British pub’s role as the focal point of the community, where young and old, rich and poor, Leavers and Remainers, can come together in a spirit of mutual tolerance to moan about the weather, opine on Liverpool’s chances in the Premier League or pass on dodgy tips for the 3.15 at Newmarket.

Yet for decades the very survival of this wonderful institution has been under threat, first from the breathalyser, then the smoking ban and the minimum wage — and now from the rapacity of local and national government, imposing ever higher business rates and duties on alcohol.

Once upon a time, almost every community in the country could boast a variety of social hubs, from the parish church to the sub-post office, the butcher, the baker and the greengrocer.

Boost

Yet one by one these have closed, as church attendance has plummeted and the internet and out-of-town supermarkets have killed off local bank branches and the High Street.

Meanwhile Facebook, Twitter and the like — advertised as brilliant new means of bringing people together — are in fact destroying true social interaction, as people increasingly spend their time in the privacy of their homes, jabbing away at computers.

In more isolated parts of the country, it has come to the point where a single, struggling pub is the only communal space left in which locals can meet to pass the time of day in each other’s company. Any hint of an upturn in the sector can only be cause for rejoicing.

All right, I admit that in bemoaning the death of the High Street and the closure of local bank branches, I’m something of a hypocrite. Indeed, I’m as guilty as celebrities who fly back and forth across the Atlantic to join protests against carbon emissions, or those politicians who never go to the local library except to protest against its closure.

I, too, have been shunning the High Street to do my Christmas shopping over the internet, seduced by Amazon’s low prices and the convenience of having everything delivered to my door. And though I rail against the closure of my local bank branch, I don’t believe I visited it more than half a dozen times over the 30 years I’ve been in the neighbourhood.

But in urging readers to visit their local more often, and so to boost the recovery in the pub sector, I write with the clearest of consciences.

One thing I can guarantee: whatever the result of the election, you’ll find me at my local today. As to whether I’ll be raising a celebratory glass to the wisdom of the electorate or drowning my sorrows, well, I’ll just have to wait and see.