MEG Talk – December 6th - Champagne Charlie’s
I’d like to thank Jon for asking me to address you tonight, not least because it enables me to fulfil a long standing ambition to meet one of my heroes, Bill Keegan.
As an Economics student in the 1980’s Bill’s columns were my regular reading and his books still reside between JK Galbraith and EF Schumacher on my bookshelf today. In those hostile days of Monetarism it was Bill who showed me that it was OK to come out of the closet, hold my head high and say “I am a Keynesian.”
As it’s the start of the festive season I thought I‘d give you a personal and topical view of why it is good to feel good about beer. However last week an announcement took place that has moved me to offer up a small prayer.
“Lord, We pray for the Cistercian monks of Orval, Westmalle, Westveleren, Rochefort and Chimay, as these, your loyal servants, who make some of the finest beers in the world,will be the principal losers when our government introduces its super-tax on beers over 7.5%. Lord, we wish to join in with the makers of cider in giving thanks that this new taxation does not apply to them thus rendering it completely bloody useless. Lord, We pray for the soul of whichever clueless berk thought up this imbecilic tax, and forgive them, Lord, for they knowest not what they do. Amen.”
Maintaining the religious theme for a moment; I am reminded of the comment by the great evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane, when asked whether anything could be concluded about the Creator from the study of creation. “An inordinate fondness for beetles” he is said to have replied. Well there may be an awful lot of beetles in the world. But there really is an awful lot of yeast in the world. One millilitre of fermenting wort contains some 40 million yeast cells, making yeast, not the dog, both man’s best friend, and the most successful organism that there has ever been or ever will be. Not for nothing did Benjamin Franklin say ‘Beer is God’s proof that he loves us.” My point being, that, whether you are atheist or creationist, it is pretty clear than mankind has evolved to drink or was intended to drink.
Let me elaborate, but first the disclaimer. Yes, overindulgence and dependence is tragic and damaging and affects others not just the alcoholic, and government should address this. I would argue, however, but not here and now, that they do NOT seriously address these issues and that the standard of debate today is considerably below the standard of debate on the matter of 150 years ago.
Most of us are not alcoholics, however. We are adults and there is one fact that is inevitably overlooked each time some Nutty Professor tells us that tells you that drinking alcohol is more dangerous than taking cocaine. Unlike drugs or tobacco, moderate alcohol consumption is good for you. Moderate drinkers outlive teetotallers.
A lot of people have heard about the cardio-vascular benefits of red wine, but few of you, in this wine snobbish nation that we undoubtedly are, will know that whatever goodies wine contains beer contains too and more besides. Ironically beer is actually a very female friendly drink. Compounds in hops are shown to offer protection against osteoporosis - a condition that generally affects women more than men - and cervical cancer - a condition that absolutely affects women more than men. The lupulin in hops has long been known to facilitate the flow of breast milk, and aside from being stuff full of vitamins beer is also the richest single dietary source of folic acid. In short ladies, should you wish to get pregnant, drink lots of beer. You will find it effective in so many ways.
Not only is beer good for us, without it we would not be here.
Bier ist Brot, say the Bavarians. More accurately they should say Brot ist Bier, for there are some anthropologists who suggest that early and medieval ales were actually more nutritious than bread. Others, notably Solomon Katz, speculate that the desire to make beer was a major driver in the transition from hunter-gathering to sedentary agriculture.
Nomads - Civilisation-Safe Water - Romans Greeks - Greek Sylogism - Dilution of wine.
Beer is not a sin substance. Beer is central to our modern existence.
So it should come as no surprise to discover that when, for example, in 1254 Henry III appointed Justices of the Peace to oversee the licensing of inns and alehouses, he was doing so, not to restrict or regulate the trade. He was doing so in order to guarantee supply. Sadly many justices over the centuries saw their job as prohibition not provision and history is full of periods – especially of Puritan ascendency – when suppression was their aim. However, there is a conflict here between the interests of government and the aims of its agents. In 1790 the revenue complained that over-zealous suppression by Puritan magistrates was harming the national income. Please bear in mind that this was a time the time the country was literally run by drunkards.
“Men of all ages drink abominably. Fox drinks what I should call a great deal, though he is not reckoned to do so by his superiors. Sheridan excessively and Grey more than any of them, but it is a much more gentlemanly way than our Scotch drunkards, and is always accompanied with lively, clever conversation on subjects of importance. Pitt I am told drinks as much as anybody.” (Sir Gilbert Elliot in Andre Simon - Bottlescrew Days: Wine drinking in England in the 18thC
The level of Puritan zealotry was cause for concern for the simple reason that the country’s finances were founded on drink. In 1738 income from brewing accounted for 25% of ALL tax income. By 1878 it was even greater, a correspondent writing that:
“The total amount of capital invested in the liquor trades in the United Kingdom amounts to about one hundred and seventeen million pounds sterling. This sum is equal to more than half the total value of our exports, and is more than double the annual receipts of all the railways. About one-third of the whole National Revenue is drawn from this source.”
Yet, abuse by JPs reached such a high point at the start of the 19thC that one laissez-faire commentator concluded that ‘there must be a small massacre of magistrates, nothing else will do.’ As the century progressed and Temperance became THE leading political question of the century, magistrates became bolder. Temperance campaigners actively insinuated themselves onto licensing benches, and as brewers were quite properly barred from sitting, they had a free run to attempt to destroy the licensed trade. Once the political parties became clearly divided on the drink issue which they did after the draconian Aberdare Act of 1872 they nearly succeeded. This was the Act that was so hated that at the 1874 election Gladstone was famously “borne down in a torrent of gin and beer”.
In short the licensing system in this country was characterised by widespread abuse of power by the justices and magistrates from about five minutes after Henry III set it up until the post war system of brewster sessions sitting before stipendiary magistrates advised by professional licensing clerks. This was an unglamourous cog in the overall British administrative apparatus, but it turned silently, efficiently and cost effectively, having taken some 700 years to bring to perfection. Inexplicably Tony Blair then abolished it and replaced it with the complete dog’s dinner that is local authority control. Yet the history of devolved licensing in the UK is one that is profoundly authoritarian.
Consider Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham . In 1887 the Kendal division of the Westmorland Licensing Board suppressed the public house of a Miss Sharp on the grounds of superfluity. Miss Sharp sued the chairman of the licensing board, Mr Wakefield on the grounds that he was acting beyond his powers. The case rose through the courts to the House of Lords where the long suffering Miss Sharp lost her appeal. The results were immediate and reached their high point in the Birmingham Scheme. Set in train in 1897 it was intended to be a means of managing the transfer of licences from the city centre to the expanding suburbs. In fact it quickly became an experiment in urban eugenics.
“The scale generally accepted for the renewal of a publicans licence to a new site where there were no licensed premises before is three on licences; for an entirely new beer off licence, two on licences; for a new beer wine and spirit of licence, two and a half on licences . . . For alterations involving considerable extension as many as two licences have been surrendered. Generally it is one on licence or two off licences for a considerable extension of existing licensed premises.” From Oliver – Renaissance of the English Public House – Faber & Faber - 1947
It relied upon the co-operation of the breweries - who had no choice - and therefore meant the peripheralisation of the landlord. The brewers combined to form a company which was entrusted with negotiating with the justices how licenses were to be surrendered. The company then organised the distribution of compensation to its constituent brewery members paid out of levied subscriptions. The compensation went, however, to the brewer, not to the licensee whose livelihood was ruined not by his own actions or the operation of the free market, but by the collusion of the brewers and justices whose actions were completely ultra vires. Between 1904 and 1914 1000 licences disappeared in Birmingham as a result of this flagrant abuse of power.
The Birmingham Scheme was the blueprint for the sinisterly named 1910 Licensing (Consolidation) Act, giving magistrates de jure the powers they had taken de facto. Licensing benches started interfering in private businesses in a way that would be intolerable in any other walk of life. An Act of 1904 had already established the principle of compensation for landlords whose licenses were suppressed or surrendered. The temperance lobby had opposed compensation, but once it had arrived they used it to salve their consciences. If they chose to destroy a man’s business, he was, was he not, in receipt of compensation? They were not troubled by the fact that the compensation fund was paid for by a levy on publicans. The publicans who businesses were being forcibly closed by justices operating to an openly temperance agenda must have felt that they were being lined up against the wall to be shot, but only after they had been made to pay for the bullets.
Time precludes me from going into detail about the culmination of the temperance campaign to make Britain dry, which saw Sunday closing in Wales and Scotland and the Constitutional Crisis of 1910-11 in which the licensing bill of 1908 was the preliminary skirmish, and which would, amongst other things reduced the number of pubs in England by 30% and have banned female employment in pubs. Imagine that. No barmaids in Britain, by Law.
In 2003 one million people marched through London to protest against the invasion of Iraq. In 1908 when the population of Britain was only 37 million 800,000 people rallied in Hyde Park to protest against the bill. Happily the lords shared the general public’s view that it was a thoroughly draconian piece of legislation. Lord Salisbury, not a noted pub goer, was unimpressed by the prohibitionists’ rhetoric that closing pubs reduced drunkenness. “He,” he said, “had a great many bedrooms, but he didn’t find that that led to him sleeping more.” The lords’ killed the bill. The nation rejoiced.
Well here we are in 2010 and plus ca change. Whatever the merits of the 2007 smoking ban the fact remains that this was a measure that was going to have adverse effects on thousands of pubs, clubs and bingo halls. Was there a quid pro quo from the government, something to cushion the blow? Was there hell. In the 2008 budget the government put up beer duty by an eye watering 18%. This is a double whammy as pubs pass the duty increase on, but supermarkets with their oligopoly powers often tell the producer that they have no intention of passing the duty rise on to consumers. Isn’t it supposed to be a consumer tax?
So when pubs go to the wall at the rate of 35 a week as they were in 2009 that may be said to be suppression without compensation 100 years on. To my mind we are back in 1908 over again, but this time Hyde Park is empty.
I occasionally try to get Jon to rise to the bait by insisting that Boris Johnson is not a conservative, as his first act as Mayor of London was to ban drink on the tube and buses. Out, I put it to him, are Conservative ideals of individual freedom, with rights and responsibilities going hand in hand. In is the knee jerk, nannying, authoritarian, populist, prohibtionism that we might expect from a Blunkett or a Harman.
Consider the situation. You may travel by train from Euston to Watford, and purchase two cans of beer, sold to you by the train operating company. You can happily and legally consume one of them. Should you then return from Watford to Euston Square, this time using the Metropolitan Line, and attempt to consume the second can, you will be committing a criminal offence. The law, like the Mayor, is absurd. The logic is profoundly absurd. Some people, as yet unspecificed, argues Boris, may drink irresponsibly on public transport. Therefore we shall take the freedom to drink on public transport away from everyone. Not a big deal you may argue, you may wish that he had banned the take away chicken dinner while he was at it. Change the topic, however, and the logic looks much more sinister. Those people over there may vote for the BNP. What shall we do about it? Shall we take the vote away from everyone? Far-fetched you may say, but only 100 years ago in Birmingham the authorities were doing just that.
It was the twentieth century essayist Hillaire Belloc who said, “When you have lost your inns, then drown your sorry selves, for you will have lost the last of England.” Well pubs are still shutting at around 29 a week at the moment. The government’s response in the name of curbing binge drinking and promoting responsible drinking is to discourage supervised drinking in pubs and promote unsupervised, invisible drinking in the home and the only club in their golf bag is tax, but the issue isn’t one of price. It’s one of culture.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could be proud of our brewing heritage. After all London was the brewing capital of the world from the time of Henry VIII to the final quarter of the reign of Queen Victoria.
We are a nation of beer drinkers. In volume terms, 80% of all the alcoholic liquid drunk in the UK is still beer. Though if you were to open a Sunday supplement you could be forgiven for thinking that wine is the only drink worth drinking. It appears to be the only one worth writing about.
If wine making were hard, French peasants wouldn’t be able to do. Stamp on a grape and half the job is done. Making beer is much harder than or making wine or, for that matter, spirits. Yet in the 18thC theLondon brewers were the largest manufacturing concerns in the world. They were pioneers, not just in the adoption of technology, but developed many of the tools of modern capitalism from first principles, concepts like rates of return on capital were developed by the managers of establishments like Whitbread, whose brewery in Chiswell St was the third largest in the world, or Truman’s in Brick Lane whose brewery was the second largest in the world, or Barclay Perkins where Shakespeare’s Globe stands today whose brewery was the largest in the world. No small wonder that the owners of these firms paid Gainsborough and Romney to paint these men. They created much of the wealth needed to create an Empire.
I once went to the Drinktec Interbrau exhibition in Munich. A young German girl was working on a Japanese brewing stand which featured a green beer with Wasabi in it. What did it taste like I asked her. “I don’t know I haven’t tried it.” She replied. “Why not?” I asked. “ Because I am from Munich.”
If we British were like her and knew and were proud of our history and culture we would drink more responsibly because we would be able to make informed decisions rather than merely consuming the marketing surrounding products that have no intrinsic merit other than intoxication. Ultimately it is not about alcohol or how cheap it is per unit. It is about culture. If you don’t believe me, believe Kate Fox.
Fox argues that our beliefs about alcohol act as self-fulfilling prophecies, and divides countries with problematic and angst ridden attitudes to drink from more relaxed cultures where alcohol is a more ‘normal, integral, taken-for-granted, morally neutral part of everyday life. What defines them, she says, is not per capita consumption – the relaxed nations unsually have higher per capita consumption – but whether or not they have had a history of temperance campaigning. The angst ridden countries have. These conclusions, she goes to so say, is such a commonplace amongst her peers that she gets ‘weary’ of repeating them, however:
“Everyone is always really surprised – ‘Really? You mean there are cultures where people don’t believe that alcohol causes violence? How extraordinary?’ - and politely determined to let nothing shake their faith in the evil powers of the demon drink. It’s like trying to explain the causes of rain tp some remote mud-hut tribe in thrall to the magic of witch doctors and rain makers. Yes, yes, they say, but of course the real reason it hasn’t rained is because the ancestors are angry because the shaman did not perform the rain-dance or goat-sacrifice at the correct time and someone allowed uncircumcised boys or menstruating women to touch the sacred skulls. Everyone knows that. Just like everyone knows that drinking alcohol makes people lose their inhibitions and start bashing each others heads in.” Kate Fox – Watching the English – Hodder - 2004
I quoted Hiliare Belloc a moment ago I will leave you with a quote from the eighteenth century essayist Sydney Smith who said, “What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia.”
If we were to decide that being proud of our heritage rather than ashamed, that, and not idiotic tax increases heaped upon failed tax increases, would be a step in the right direction.
Merry Christmas one and all.
