Taking the piss
The Powers that Be are sounding the death knell for the rural pub.
Their proposals for post-Virus are just plain ridiculous.
No sitting at the bar?
Only one table per ten square meters?
Only one person in the jax at a time?
Perspex screens on the counter?
The pub is what its name stems from – a public room. It is a place to buy alcohol of course but for so many people it’s a place of connection. It’s a place where, if you live alone, you can go there and meet friends for a convivial chat about the match, or politics, or whatever takes a fancy. If you don’t meet a friend you can still sit at the bar and enjoy the presence of others around you. For so many, it is a refuge from loneliness and something to look forward to at the end of the day.
The rot started with the smoking ban. That crippled a load of pubs and forced them out of business. Then the laws were changed so that even a pint could lose you your licence. Now thy want to punish them further by heavily restricting the number of customers, and creating an atmosphere that is anything but social.
Who the fuck wants to order a pint through a perspex screen? Who wants a place where you can’t even chat to the barman? Are they going to have red and green lights over the jax door to tell you when it’s “safe” to enter?
How many pubs will never reopen? How many will experience lonliness and isolation?
This is going to have so many unintended consequences.
I'm not so sure about the "unintended" bit…
Note that it's the pubs' representatives who came up with this plan. Weird?
I doubt the gubmint would want to close the pubs as they would lose too much revenue from tax and excise. I know there are some out there campaigning for all pubs to be permanently shut – no chance.
Not at all – people purporting to support the industry have form for acting like turkeys voting for Christmas; when it came to the smoking ban, for example.
*sigh* You're right of course. Brown envelopes?!
Speechless
There is a nasty puritanism exerting influence at the moment. It's against meat, against dairy produce, against farming, against cars, against flying, against holidays, against travel, against buying things, against contact sports, and now, it seems, against alcohol.
No. It's been going on for years. Literally.
#FunSponges.
The sort of people who once ran the Catholic Church seem to have taken control of state agencies.
They want to make Ireland a really fun place for visitors to come to.
No pubs, no craic, no meat, no dairy produce, no tobacco, no conviviality.
Soon the Irish will be travelling overseas to Irish themed parks with little theme villages with packed theme pubs with Oirish singing and dancing.
Then back home to delicious Quorn meals and bed when the sun goes down.
Governments hate pubs – they are places where mature adults can congregate randomly and engage in unmonitored and unmoderated discussions of any topic they care to raise. It's a fair bet that most of those topics do not fit with 'the programme' and, therefore, present a dangerous opportunity for 'unhelpful' groundswells to develop amongst voters, with no moderating authority (like a state broadcaster, for example) to steer the debate onto safer ground.
By encouraging folk to do their drinking at home, they will usually be doing it to the accompaniment of the big flat screen in the corner, ensuring that they only ever receive the approved opinion. Government still collects the taxes on all the booze, so no loss there, but drinking at home keeps both the streets and the mindsets tidier. What's not to like?
A few years ago on my way home through Birmingham city centre I found myself walking behind a lumbering pair of what at first glance appeared to be giant sloths but were actually police officers. We walked through several groups of 'yoot' belching vast quantities of cannabis smoke into the atmosphere, past a floridly mad man gibbering, admittedly harmlessly, into the heavens and another foaming-at-the-mouth nutter issuing violent threats to some invisible foe. None of these stimuli provoked even a flicker of interest. Then suddenly these human lichens burst into life and began barking into their radios, ordering CCTV to focus on the scene. The 'emergency'? They had spotted a man holding a pint glass standing on the threshold of a pub, getting fresh air on what was a blisteringly hot summer day. Dixon of Dock Green must be turning in his grave.
Dear Grandad
Hope all is going well with Herself and Yourself.
The native cunning of bureaucrats and latter day puritans runs deep. Some of them may only be aware of the 'unintended' consequences at a sub-conscious level, but they instinctively know what to do to create a desired outcome – making the livestock miserable whilst trousering their treasure extorted via taxation. Government is the organised crime syndicate that makes all things legal, for them.
In other news, I thought you might have commented on this, via Catalaxy Files Downunder:
https://twitter.com/nialloloughlin/status/1255533906578870274
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2020/05/06/western-civilisation-odoherty-waters-for-the-defence/
DP