What is the point of the Campaign for Real Ale?
I guess there's a clue in the name but does anyone really think real ale wouldn't exist without an organisation extolling its virtues?
It's like suggesting that without Mensa clever people wouldn't exist (or, to be more accurate, people who can do IQ tests).
Anyway, CAMRA has been in the news this week – Law change needed to save pubs, says Campaign for Real Ale).
What's perverse is the fact that CAMRA said and did nothing about the smoking ban when 52 pubs were closing every week five years ago.
I expected nothing more because CAMRA actively welcomed the ban. In fact, in CAMRA's brave new world the smoking ban would breathe new life into Britain's pub industry because it would attract thousands of new customers.
Curiously this never happened. Instead, in the years following the ban, thousands of pubs closed. Yes there were other factors but research commissioned by Forest using information from a respected industry database demonstrated there was a direct connection between pub closures and bans in England, Scotland and Ireland. (See Smoking ban and pub closures.)
Despite this CAMRA continued to say nothing to oppose the ban. In 2009, when we launched the Save Our Pubs & Clubs campaign and called for separate smoking rooms, they didn't want to know.
In 2011, when we organised a reception at the House of Commons to lobby MPs and draw attention to the plight of Britain's pubs, they didn't even bother to reply to our invitation.
The previous year I briefly considered attending their members' weekend on the Isle of Man. I thought we might book a stand to raise awareness of the Save Our Pubs & Clubs campaign. Someone (the person trying to sell me the stand, I suspect) suggested they could arrange for me to address the 300 or so delegates.
Needless to say it didn't happen. I imagine there was no enthusiasm for the idea at CAMRA HQ which was a pity because I fancied a weekend off the coast of Wales, even if it meant spending time with several hundred real ale huggers.
Bizarrely I was later sent an email inviting Forest to advertise in a CAMRA publication:
I look after the advertising for CAMRA’s membership publications What’s Brewing and Beer magazine as well as www.CAMRA.org.uk that is soon to be re-launched.
If you are interested in appealing to the 117,000 members let me know and I can put together a proposal. In the meantime please find out media pack attached. Obviously CAMRA would be a good organisation to work alongside with there [sic] campaigning background!
I wish.
CAMRA's spineless attitude to the smoking ban goes back a long way. The most damning indictment of their position is a letter written by Joe Jackson. I don't think I've published it before, although Joe did write an article on the subject that was published in Spiked (via The Free Society).
Written in March 2006 Joe's letter read:
Dear CAMRA,
I hereby resign my membership of CAMRA. I do so with great regret, since I've been a member for over 20 years. But I have been exasperated by your stance on the imminent smoking ban in pubs, and your cover article 'Relief Over Smoke Ban' is the last straw. True, CAMRA has expressed a preference for 'separate rooms without bar counters'. But this was hardly very supportive of smokers, and elsewhere, in editorials and articles, you've shown a distinct antismoking bias.
I thought CAMRA stood for freedom of choice and respect for the tastes of minorities (eg real ale drinkers). Now you greet a total ban not with outrage or even regret, but 'relief'. You have the nerve to add: 'the pub is for everyone'. Everyone, apparently, except smokers. (And it's disingenuous to say we're still welcome as long as we don't smoke. It's like telling a steak-lover that he's still welcome in his favourite restaurant even though it's gone vegetarian.)
Perhaps, like Messrs Blair and Brown (who wouldn't commit themselves until the last minute, when they saw which way the wind was blowing) you want to be seen as 'backing the winner'? You even celebrate that old cliché, the 'level playing field'. Well, I suppose it's 'level' for the antismoking lobby, since they win a 100% victory. And 'level' for those of us who like a pint and a smoke, since we will have precisely zero places to do so.
'Level' doesn't always mean fair. I would say that rather than being levelled, the playing field has been laid waste so that no one can play at all. I believe CAMRA is making a big mistake here, and is certainly not speaking on my behalf; I am far from 'relieved,' and not just because I want to smoke. There are other issues and principles involved.
Do you seriously believe that the government is entitled to pass a law banning smoking in every pub, restaurant and club in the country on the basis that some people don't like smoke? Even if a lot of people don't like smoke, this is none of the government's business. It is for the hospitality industry to address, with better ventilation and more nonsmoking zones, and this was already happening.
I'm all for pubs going nonsmoking voluntarily if they see a demand. But most pubgoers accept that pubs have been smoker's havens for centuries, and don't mind people smoking around them as long as the air isn't too smoky. Good ventilation/air filtration systems (as used in hospitals and laboratories) can quite easily make smoke barely noticeable. Add a bit of tolerance and we could avoid segregation and 'tribal warfare' between smokers and nonsmokers. I don't know what percentage of pubgoers drink real ale, but the percentage who smoke are (depending on who you believe) anything from 45% to 49%. You can't discriminate against that many people without affecting the whole atmosphere, culture and purpose of the pub.
CAMRA should have been a voice of reason and compromise. Instead you print countless letters from people calling for a total ban just because they personally really hate smoke. (Oddly enough, they didn't seem to have too much of a problem a few years ago.) Have they been in a properly-ventilated pub? Have they even been in a pub since the 1960s? And if they're in a nonsmoking room or nonsmoking pub, does the knowledge that there are people smoking in another pub around the corner really spoil their evening? These people should be politely told to grow up.
Of course, the ultimate justification for a total smoking ban is the idea that so-called 'secondhand smoke' poses a grave, even mortal, threat to the health of bar staff. As someone who has studied this issue in depth I can promise you that there is not a shred of proof of this. The 'death counts' are computer projections based on junk science statistics; there are no documented, proven cases of death specifically caused by 'secondhand smoke'.
It is true that 27 out of 147 studies to date have managed to come up with a tiny degree of 'risk elevation' (the highest being the much-quoted 25%, which in context is actually statistically insignificant). But if you really look at the lousy methodology of the studies and the biases involved, and put things in proportion, it adds up to nothing much. There are higher proven health risks in eating mushrooms or Japanese seafood. There is more arsenic in tap water, and more benzene in coffee, than there is in 'secondhand smoke'. The flimsy evidence has been exagerrated beyond all reason because it's such a great propaganda tool.
But you're not doctors or scientists; how are you supposed to know about this stuff? Fair enough: but in a way, that's the point. CAMRA is not a medical organisation. Surely issues like social harmony in the pub, or the rights of licensees to run their own businesses how they want, should be more important to us than what the Chief Medical Officer wants? To really make pubs 'healthy,' we should ban alcohol, which causes infinitely more damage to society than tobacco.
Even if you don't believe, as I do, that there is currently a 'witch-hunt' against tobacco, can't you at least see that antismokers have an agenda? Of course they want a smoking ban. But what about pleasure, freedom of choice, tolerance, tradition, business, civil rights and property rights? What about debating the appropriate limits of government intervention in our lifestyles? Instead everyone seems eager to cave in to people like ASH, who are just a bunch of bullies who've been given lots of money to say and do anything they want so long as it's anti-smoking (and incidentally I'm convinced that CAMRA was targeted by an ASH letter-writing campaign).
I think that, unwittingly perhaps, you have joined a dismaying trend in this country towards intolerance, whining, scapegoating, fear-mongering and nannying. (We can see this in the changes to the Licensing Laws: on the one hand the scare-mongering of the Daily Mail, and on the other, the mean-spiritedness of local councils not allowing pubs to stay open even an hour later). The pub is supposed to be a refuge from all that.
The antismoking lobby has long demanded a ban on smoking in 'public places' or 'workplaces'. But a pub is neither. It is a privately-operated business, and a place to get away from work, and nagging and restrictions. Yes, a small minority of the people present are working, but even if they wanted a smoking ban (and according to a survey by The Publican, 90% of them do not), the world doesn't revolve around them. Anyway, they, like the customers, have a choice. Even if there were some small risk from smoke, why should they be forbidden to assume that risk when they are still free to work down coal mines or on lifeboats or oil rigs? Is it really 'cleaner and safer' to work as a mechanic, a welder, or a motorcycle courier?
Are you aware that the smoking ban you're so 'relieved' about will be the most draconian in the world? It will be as restrictive as Ireland but with even higher penalties. It's true that basing a compromise on the sale of food didn't really make sense. But at least it was a way of finding a compromise, and I find it unbelievable that you prefer none at all. Meanwhile the Italian ban allows separate ventilated smoking rooms. The Spanish ban only mandates smoking rooms in places above a certain size. Even New York has exempted a few bars and in Los Angeles there are many places where you can smoke outside, under awnings etc. (Neither our climate nor our urban geography are conducive to that).
Best of all, the Dutch parliament, unlike our own, actually studied the evidence on 'secondhand smoke' and concluded that it didn't justify a ban. Instead they allowed the hospitality industry a 5-year period to introduce better ventilation and more nonsmoking zones. The only people who will be unhappy with this are a small minority of fanatics - the same people who, in this country, are being allowed to set the agenda.
Some of us will continue to campaign for something more reasonable, but we are bracing for all the same things that have happened in New York and Ireland: pubs going out of business, crowds of people standing outside, publicans being made responsible for noise and litter control, confusion as people try get around the law, social disruption, and a biased media proclaiming it all a big success because it's not politically correct to stand up for smokers.
As long as there aren't riots in the streets, authorities will portray the ban as 'popular', and the stage will be set for more and more restrictions on food, drink, noise and who knows what else. I think you are naïve not to see this.
Many people will of course find that the ban personally suits them. But many others will feel angry and unwelcome. For us, a pub that forbids us to smoke is just not a pub. It's like a fish and chip shop that forbids us to use any salt or vinegar. We'll just have to put up with it for as long as it lasts - which, I have no doubt, will not be forever. Meanwhile the culture of the British pub will have been damaged in a way which zealous smoke-haters simply fail, or refuse, to recognise.
Yours, with great sadness,
Joe Jackson
Meanwhile, here's an email to Forest from a CAMRA 'insider', dated September 2009:
It is official CAMRA policy (adopted at our 2005 AGM in Glasgow after a policy planning workshop and a fierce floor debate and preceded by a string of articles in What's Brewing) to back the 'smoking room' option, which you also propound. You might get in touch with the CEO Mike Benner to remind him forcibly of the fact and demand CAMRA's support. He will be embarrassed because after the Glasgow AGM CAMRA's campaigns team did precisely nothing to put our policy before ministers. But he can't deny that it is CAMRA policy.
There is a genuine freedom issue here and that is the freedom of the licensee to operate his/her business according to the wishes of the customer. When the smoking ban came in the Government at a stroke devalued both the income and capital value of what is, for most licensees, an enormous investment and their home as well as their living. Licensees are small businesspeople and in most cases simply can't afford to lose such a chunk of revenue and capital.
In addition here are some notes – written by a former Forest colleague – from a March 2010 meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Save The Pub Group (run and administered by CAMRA in the same way that ASH runs the APPG on Smoking and Health).
Described as a "public debate" on saving the pub, it was attended by approximately 80 people and chaired by Greg Mulholland MP (Lib Dem). A panel of speakers consisted of Tobias Ellwood MP (Conservative), Don Foster MP (Lib Dem), Gerry Sutcliffe MP (Labour Licensing Minister) and Mike Benner (CAMRA chief executive).
Greg Mulholland welcomed everyone and let everyone know that NO questions were to be taken from the audience and NO comments allowed from the floor. He then handed over to CAMRA's Mike Benner who enthused about how wonderful it was to see this level of support for the British pub etc etc.
Benner emphasised that the debate was about community pubs (urban Wetherspoonites not invited). He noted how society has become too individualistic, pubs needed to bring more social cohesion etc, then added that 70 per cent of all alcohol purchased in UK is from supermarkets (cue hisses and boos). His main point was that the next government needed to involve itself in 'joined-up thinking'.
Lots of questions on planning aspects, beer duty, pub ties etc. Then finally, as we're almost out of time, Mulholland announced, "And we have two questions on the smoking ban, one from John Porter of A Pie and A Pint and one from Forest."
After reading out the questions GM threw it open to the panel, saying, "Is anyone prepared to put their head over the parapet on this one?" Much laughter ensued and eventually Tobias Elwood spoke.
He said it was "naive of anyone to think that the smoking ban did not have an impact on pubs". He noted that the consequences of the ban were not properly thought out. He thought the way in which the ban was issued dealt a "hammer blow" to the trade and the effects of the ban along with the recession created a "double whammy which has definitely hurt the pub trade".
Don Foster said that for all this, if the free vote were taken again, he would still vote the same way (ie for the comprehensive smoking ban). He did however say that it would be "crazy" to impose a doorway ban but he thought the ban was an important step in improving the health of the nation.
GM then asked for a show of hands and only ten or so went up in favour of rescinding the ban entirely.
He then rephrased the question to ask how many would support an "amendment" to the ban (ie separate smoking rooms). This time 40-50 hands went up. GM said of this response, "I hope this will please Forest who asked the question."
He turned to Gerry Sutcliffe to ask what the [Labour] Government's current stance was. Sutcliffe replied that the industry and the Government needed to find more "creative ways of dealing with the issue" and called for a proportionate response. He said quite clearly that if a landlord has provided an outdoor garden for smokers then he "sees no problem with that, and will support them" and there should be no extensions of the smoking ban into doorways.
CAMRA'S Mike Benner did not comment.
Chris Snowdon has also written about CAMRA this week. I urge you to read his post, CAMRA: Still ignoring the elephant in the pub (Velvet Glove Iron Fist).
See also: The smoking ban, not cheap supermarket alcohol, has decimated British pubs (Breitbart News).
I also note this comment on the Friends of Forest Facebook page, posted in response to another article that mentions CAMRA, Time to revive pub-lic life (Spiked):
I was a member of CAMRA right from the beginning but resigned in disgust at their support for the smoking ban. July 1st 2007 was most definitely CAMRA's sell by date! Many publicans actually believed the nonsense that millions of non smokers were going to rush into their pubs on July 1st. It never happened and most will now admit they were wrong and should have stood up against the ban.
Saturday, August 30, 2014 at 15:28 