Brewing In London

Below is the text of my speech to the London Beer Bloggers Conference. Apologies for the length.

Who on earth asked me to give a lecture on ‘Brewing in London’. It should be the subject of an entire conference. All I can hope to do today is touch upon a few themes. These I will illustrate by reference to the building we are in, and, of course, the man that built it.

Samuel Whitbread was born on August 20th 1720 of Yeoman stock, who, being from Bedfordshire had fought on the Parliamentarian side during the Civil War and were duly rewarded. Whitbread’s father was Receiver-General for Taxes for Bedfordshire and was fairly well off. Samuel was, however, the seventh of eight children and only seven years old when his father died. His prospects were modest. Aged 16 he was apprenticed for a fee of £300 to John Wightman, Master of the Brewers’ Company, and went to work at his brewery in Clerkenwell. Self-disciplined and industrious he left his apprenticeship 7 months early and set up on his own account, going into partnershiup with Godfrey and Thomas Shewell on December 11 1742. The partnership was valued at £14,116, and comprised two small breweries, the Goat Brewhouse on the corner of Old St and Upper Whitecross St and a smaller one nearby in what is now Central St. The majority of the firm’s assets were some £9,405 worth of loans to publicans, as well as the 14 leases on public houses owned alongside 18 horses, 1,933 butts, 149 pipes, 293 puncheons, 142 half-hogsheads, 200 kilderkins and 179 firkins. Whitbread bought himself into the Shewell’s business with £2,000 of patrimony, £600 from the sale of a small estate he inherited via his mother and a number of borrowings from family and friends. He was 22 years old.

Devout and Puritan, hard work was clearly a major plank in Whitbread’s success. Attention to detail was also important. Whitbread was his own head brewer. By 1748 he was hiring his own maltings in Hitchin, but hops were a much more volatile commodity and here he had to trust to the vagaries of the market paying £4,200 for hops in 1747, £1,600 in 1748, £5,400 in 1749 and £2,970 in 1750.

Interestingly Whitbread’s leases were not really much of an asset, a factor that bears on the growth of the tie, as we shall see below. All 14 properties were held on intermediary leases meaning the receipts of £377 barely covered the £375 in rents paid to the head leaseholders. Repairs and maintenance meant he was losing money. The leases were held reluctantly, purely to prevent the houses and their volumes passing to rivals.

At the end of the 1742 brewing season the firm had produced a respectable 18,000 barrels. By comparison in 1748 London’s largest brewer Sir William Calvert was brewing 55,700 barrels, but by this time Whitbread was bursting at the seams and hiring cellars in 54 separate locations in which to store maturing beer.

Expansion was a must. Godfrey Shewell disagreed took his money out and joined another brewery. The two remaining partners borrowed money and bought the derelict King’s Head Brewhouse and adjoining tenements on the south side of Chiswell St. By 1750 the whole site had been demolished and a new brewery designed for the mass production of Porter to supply a London population of 676,000 souls had been completed.

1750 was a good year to open a brewery. The orgy of gin drinking that had gripped London for thirty years - killing its citizens by the tens of thousand - was burning itself out. After many failures a number of Acts of Parliament finally curbed gin drinking and made wholesome beer a more viable alternative. Beer sales leapt forward and freed from gin’s toxic effects London’s population boomed, further boosting sales of beer. With a new modern brewhouse Whitbread was well placed to ride the crest of the wave. By 1758 his output of 65,000 barrels now outstripped that of both Calvert and Ben Truman and the 37 year old Whitbread was the largest brewer in London . In 1760 his partner Thomas Shewell decided to retire and Whitbread bought him out for £30,000, leaving himself in sole control.

The 1760s were a profitable decade. By 1769 he was producing 90,000 barrels which were returning him an average annual profit of £18,000. A new phase in the development of the firm was prompted by a fire in 1773, which was extinguished with £500 pounds worth of beer. This destroyed the 1760 Porter Tun room, the name of which was the first reference to Porter by the firm, which previously had termed its product ‘Mild’. A new storehouse was built, with enlarged vaults beneath. These were followed by additions to the Long Stable, deepening of and extensions to the vaults and in 1777 there was additional stabling and the Great Yard was paved over.

The idea to use the vaults not for vat storage, but as cisterns, was Whitbread’s own. Whitbread’s first attempts to line the cisterns with plaster proved about as waterproof as a sieve. So paying off his architect with a Bank Note for £20 he turned to the great engineer of the age John Smeaton, who proposed York stone bonded with a cement of rosin, beeswax and sand. The beer rapidly ate through this concoction. Joshiah Wedgewood was approached to line the cisterns with glazed tiles, these too leaked. Boulton and Watt were engaged to install tinned copper plates over all the joints. They leaked. Whitbread built a second cistern. It leaked. He built a third cistern. It leaked. They continued to leak for nearly a decade before being finally rendered beer-tight, by which time they had cost over £7,000, but they held some 12,000 barrels and vindicated his belief that

Their situation in the earth be beneficial beyond any cask whatever to the quality of the beer, and attended with less fermentation than casks which are more exposed to the air and of the whole admit of a longer length in the beer brewed from an equal quantity of malt and hops when kept in casks.

Beer more than any other foodstuff is capable of evolution, and the evolutionary pressures on beer are fascinating and diverse. From a London point of view war with France is one such pressure. Technological advance is another. Indeed almost every major technological advance in beer brewing over the past 300 years has put before the public a paler and/or weaker beer than was previously available and on every occasion the public has unequivocally expressed a preference for the paler and/or weaker beer, a trend that continues to this day. Indeed the one instance where beer got darker – after the introduction of Patent Malt Porter brewing after 1817 – coincided with the start of Porter’s decline.

People have long wondered at the actual causes of the origin of Porter. Thanks, very largely, to the impressive scholarship of Martyn Cornell, we now know that the invention of Porter in 1722 by one Ralph Harwood is no more than folk myth. Time prevents me from discussing Porter’s origins, but should you be interested I can recommend Martyn’s excellent books for the best explanation that we have to date.

If, as Martyn believes, porter was not invented, but evolved from existing London brown beers, as a reaction to a growing popularity for hoppier pale ales and was possibly made slightly differently with a ‘high blown’ malt, what is not in doubt is that the resulting beer enjoyed qualitative and quantitative advantages over its rivals. We now know these to be heat related. Porter was more heat tolerant, meaning more wort could be drawn from a given number of quarters of malt, it could be fermented and matured in larger quantities without problems of heat dissipation and could be brewed for more months of the year. It could also be brewed more cheaply.

By the time these advantages were fully understood by the wider beer market the porter brewers had followed the lead of Sir Humphrey Parsons who, in 1736 constructed 1,500 barrel vessels at his Red Lion brewery on the Thames at St Katherine’s and , became the first of the leading Porter brewers to move from maturation of Porter in casks in cellars or by middlemen, to maturation inside the brewery in giant vats. From this point onwards the amount of capital required to start a porter brewery began to increase considerably. This plus the sheer quantity of capital tied up in maturing beer, and the capital needed to ride through wildly fluctuating raw material costs (see Whitbreads hops) in a market where retail prices remained unchanged, all provided an ever more insurmountable barrier to entry .

Porter’s advantage therefore technological. However, once this advantage was removed at the start of the nineteenth century, when greater control over fermentation became possible, ale started to displace Porter as the public’s drink of choice.

One obvious point needs to be made in respect of London brewing. London was the largest city in the world and the largest manufactory. Both factors meant that there was a thirst immediately beyond the walls of the London brewers that could not be imitated anywhere else on the planet. The combination of a mass market and a stable product to exploit it meant that the rapid expansion of Porter brewing was inevitable as rising economies of scale continually increased the size of the most efficient level of production.

Some activities could not be displaced by gravity, or simply maximised by expanding the vessels. First amongst these was mashing in, an inescapably heavy task, predominantly in the hands of Irishmen. The removal of manual mashing was not solved for a considerable period after the introduction of steam. Shovelling out of malt required manpower too, but after that labour was not required again in quantity until racking and distribution.

The Porter brewers’ draymen were the undoubted aristocrats of the London working class. They had to be outstanding physical specimens to manhandle the 108 gallon butts which were the usual means of Porter carriage. Their horses too were the finest working beasts on London streets, in stark contrast to the poor, often blind, nags whose drudgery was to drive the mill wheel to grind malt, but whose fodder bills were equal to the dray horses.

The brewers unique ability to organise the flow of production to exclude labour, combined with a very specific labour requirement at the distribution stage meant that brewers like Truman were careful to continually calculate the size of trade needed to sustain their search for continually reduced marginal costs. The seasonal nature of brewing meant increased output continually being matched by increased storage. In the 1769-70 season for example Sir Benjamin Truman was extracting £501 worth of sales from every brew length of 126 quarters of malt (one quarter being 64 gallons volume) with expenses of £382. Expansion of the plant in 1774-5 meant that a 176qtr glye now yielded £701 worth of receipts, less £511 of expenses; an improvement of £71 per gyle deriving largely from the absence of increased overheads. He was then brewing 180 glyes per year, giving him an increased gross profit of £12,750 per annum. A staggering sum.

The proximity of other industries resulting from the density of London life meant that brewers benefited from the sale of the by-products of brewing on a scale not available to brewers elsewhere. Net consumers of yeast, distillers and bakers, bought brewers’ surpluses , and cattle fatteners bought spent grain to feed to London’s unfortunate pigs and cows living in cow-keepers dens away from natural light or open pasture. Interestingly spent grains from Porter brewing fetched less than other brewers’ grain, being known to be less nutritious as a result of the higher extraction that Porter brewing obtained. In this way Londoners were indebted to the brewers not just for their beer, but also for their bread, beef, milk and even gin.

Brewery expansion had increased the requirements for horse power in the Porter breweries and horses cost a lot more to maintain in a year than they were actually worth. Mid-century a mill horse might only cost £5 compared to £16 for a dray horse, the relative magnificence of which – in those pre-advertising days - were a major source of pride and reflected glory for the brewery. Both cost £40 a year to feed, and that is before farriers bills, ostlers’ wages , collar makers bills and other overheads were considered, never mind the precious space taken up by ever more extensive stabling.

No wonder then that when in 1782 the steam pioneering partnership of Boulton and Watt resolved to break out of their primary market of pumping engines for Cornish tin mines and develop an engine with a rotary action the London Porter brewers were high on their list of target customers. True, brewers also had the need to raise water by pumping, but while they still also had to rely on horses to turn wheels to grind malt steam was unattractive to them. When, after the Porter brewers saw how many horses could be set aside by the introduction of steam, the rush into steam was considerable. Uncharacteristically Sam Whitbread was only the second brewer to install a steam engine. He was pipped at the post by the otherwise unmemorable firm of Goodwyn of St Katherine’s who installed a 4 horsepower engine in May 1784. The fly-wheel of Whitbread’s own 10 horsepower engine started turning a month later in June. Barclay’s was commissioned in 1786. Truman’s bizarrely did not install their own engine until the astonishingly late date of 1807, not out of any horse loving conservatism, but because all earlier attempts to squeeze an engine house into the footprint of the brewery proved fruitless. By 1795 only cotton and coal possessed more steam engines than brewing.

One of Whitbread’s brewers, Joseph Delafield, wrote to his brother on 1st March 1786, and explained the firm’s general delight with steam.

Last summer we set up a steam engine for the purposes of grinding our malt and we also raise our liquor with it . . . .The improvements that have . . .been made . . . are very great indeed and will bring the machine into general use where the strength and labour of horses is largely and particularly wanted – you may remember our wheel required 6 horses but we ordered our engine the power of 10 and we think nit equal to 14 horses – for we grind with all our four mills about 40 quarters an hour beside raising the liquor. We began this season’s work with it and have now ground about 28,000 qtrs with it without accident or interruption. Its great uses and advantages give us all great satisfaction and are daily pointing out afresh to us – We put aside now full 24 horses by it which to keep up and feed did not cost us less per annum than £40 a head – the expenses of erection was about £1000. It consumes only a bushel of coals an hour and we pay an annual gratuity to Boulton and Watt during their Patent of 60 guineas.

In the years to come the brewers added more and more brewery functions to the engines’ load; mashing, cleansing and racking were all mechanised, meaning labour was largely removed from the process until the distribution stage. Visitors to London breweries, and anyone who was anyone who visited London visited a Porter brewery, would remark upon the contrast between the bustle of the yard and the silent solitude of the brewery – the noise of the engine driving all the internal operations being no louder than a clock or a spinning wheel.

Inside the brewery we also need take note of the introduction and impact of the thermometer and hydrometer or saccharometer. Which again were adopted by the London Porter breweries considerably ahead of other of brewers and brewers in other countries.

In a modern brewing context we tend to regard them as tools of production. What sold them on the thermometer and saccharometer was not their use as instruments of production but as instruments of measurement. It was the counting house not the brewhouse that championed their introduction. The London market was competitive and quality was the key area of competition. To service the costs of the high levels of capital tied up in Porter manufacture and to continue to provide a higher quality drink at competitive prices Porter brewers had to keep a close eye on the efficiency of their operations in balancing the delicate relationship between cost and quality. The length of Porter extracted from a given quantity of malt and hops was their perpetual concern. The thermometer first saw service in London breweries around 1755.

The saccharometer allowed brewers, for the first, time to make comparative assessments of the quality of any given batch of malt and between different types of malt. Their findings were to have profound implications for the flavour and colour of Porter. Pale malts were discovered to offer more sugar than dark malts and gradually, so as not to upset the consumer, Porters ceased to be made entirely from brown malt but rather with increasing quantities of pale malts to which were added smaller quantities of more highly kilned malts.

The shop is really an extension of the alehouse; the nation’s first dedicated fixed point of sale retail operation. This was so because ‘malt liquour had the largest market for cash sales of any foodstuff in mass demand.’ In London alehouses were ubiquitous and, of course, subject to special conditions not found elsewhere. For a start there were many fewer Brewing Victuallers in London, because there had been a longer tradition of Common Brewers; the Common Brewers were closer to hand, so transport was easy and the Brewing Victualler was unlikely to be able to surpass the Common Brewer in the quality of his product so few bothered to try.

Porter brewing changed the nature of retailing in London dramatically. At the end of the 17thC beer was
Mostly fetched from the brewhouse by the customers themselves and paid for in ready money so that the brewer entertained but few servants, fewer horses, and had no stock of beer and ale by him, but a trifling quantity of casks and his money returned before he paid either his duty or his malt.

Because the Porter brewers needed to raise production to maximise efficiencies they needed to control distribution which meant they had to invest in horses, drays and draymen and establish a system of accounting to deal with the large numbers of small transactions. The consequence of this new system was the existence of the Collecting Clerk, who would visit each outlet once a month to collect payment for the quantities supplied. Publicans could return unsold or poor quality beer to the brewer, who was duty bound to accept it (and anyway would reuse it for maturing new beer or for finings), and these factors together gradually transformed the London publican from shopkeeper trading on his own account to agent of the brewer. From 1765 Truman’s Rest Books start recording Beer in Publicans’ Cellars’ as an asset of the brewery. Consequently brewers also became responsible for the quality of this asset, and the position of Abroad Cooper arose specifically to look after the quality and fining of beer in pub cellars (isinglass finings having been introduced around 1740). The deskilling of the publican, which so many drinkers lament today, has its origins deep in the 18thC.

A characteristic, therefore, of the London market, was that increasingly publicans would take all their Porter from one brewer, but would remain free to take ale from whomsoever they chose. Publicans were perfectly at liberty to change Porter supplier if they so chose, even when there was a debt to the brewery, as was increasingly to become the case. Brewers, however, regarded the active encouragement of a publican to switch supplier as being ungentlemanly conduct, and very little of this appears to have taken place.

Pubs were unlike shops in one important respect. Most shopkeepers set the prices at which they sell their commodities. Historically publicans were regulated as to price, and duty rates also tended to level prices, but even when direct statutory price control declined the price mechanism did not assert itself. Instead all beer prices became regulated by the prevailing price of Porter, which was everywhere 3 d the Pot. Publicans therefore found themselves stuck between a ’fixed issuing price per barrel from the brewer and a fixed retail price per quart from the public authorities. As it was only practicable for the retail price to move in jumps one halfpenny, this virtually fixed his selling price without chance of compromise.’

London Porter prices remained constant from 1722 to 1760. When the taxation required to pay for the Seven Years War forced an increase in a price that had remained unchanged for the lifetime of most Londoners, it put a strain on the system whereby to maintain a steady price brewers took the hit in years of poor harvest when malt and hop prices rose, but took the gain in years of plenty. The brewers could not accept the tax increase as well as the raw material risk and prices rose, and the new price of 3.5d per pot survived until the exigencies of the Napoleonic Wars started to bite in 1799.

Publicans’ tight margins meant that it didn’t take much to induce them to extend the volume of their stock by adulteration. As the brewers’ reputations and consequent fortunes depended upon the quality of their beers, adulteration was something they were determined to eradicate.

As the century progressed and the commercial pressure on Porter brewers to expand to chase efficiencies outstripped the growth of available outlets, combined, after the Gin Fever of the Hogarthian period, with increasing hostility towards public houses by licensing justices, meant brewers gradually became more insecure about their distribution. Increasing land values and premiums associated with entry into a public house meant that publicans, who were not usually people of substance in their own right, increasingly relied upon assistance from the brewers in order to set up in business, a situation exacerbated in the licensed trade by the tradition of ‘goodwill’ payments. Usually this assistance took the form of credit. Occasionally it took the form of a loan where a property needed improvement and the landlord’s lease may well have been used as security. The tie started therefore as a consequence of a natural level of business failure that found brewers owning leases.

The situation was about to change, for after 1794 Justices actively began to look for opportunities to withdraw licenses at the annual September Brewster Sessions. Increasing premiums and ‘goodwill’, adulteration, scarcity of properties , political antipathy towards brewers as the political pendulum swung towards free trade, an increase in crime, bad harvests, war taxation and a decline in the rate of building in London and in demand for beer, all made a reluctant transition from passive to active acquisition of public houses the obvious response of the brewers.

The Biggleswade brewer Samuel Wells wrote to his friend Sam Whitbread in 1813 shedding light on the attitude of the brewers.

It was never my wish to increase the number of Public Houses, nor I never did apply to get a licence to a House that was not licensed before, neither did I ever purchase a Public House out of my trade, those that I supplied of course I bought, and some of them at a very high price. . . .

In short the tied trade in London was inevitable and, once more, it was London’s unique circumstances that meant that the tie was much more a feature of the trade here than elsewhere, and was for example, rare in Scotland and absent in Ireland.

If the 18thC was the Porter century the 19thC was the Pale Ale century. A number of factors combined to promote the shift. Most importantly the attemperator, but also the increasing use of steam power was removing the technological advantage enjoyed by Porter. The hardships imposed by taxation to finance the Napoleonic Wars– especially after 1803 -, combined with bad harvests in the 1820s encouraged adulteration and dark Porter was easier to adulterate than clearer ale, a new middle class were wanting something other to drink than Porter, and a renewed outbreak of gin drinking in the late 1820s all contributed. We tend to assume that the Burton Ale brewers were the chief beneficiaries, but in fact it was the London Ale brewers who were the first to prosper at the expense of Porter, no one more so than Mann, Crossman and Paulin, the fastest growing brewery concern of the Victorian era.

Things came to a head in 1830 when the wider political issues of Repeal of the Corn Laws, Catholic Emancipation, Free Trade and an anti-big brewer sentiment driven by resentment of their supposed monopoly, all combined to produce the Beer Act of 1830. A hugely liberalising piece of legislation. The Act repealed the duties on strong beer and cider and, in addition, any rate payer could apply for a two guinea per annum licence to sell beer on or off the premises. The beer shop was born. Or rather thousands of beer shops were born, 24, 324 within 6 months and 45,717 within 8 years. The Act was intended to stimulate agricultural demand, break the Common Brewers monopoly and substitute beer for gin. In all these it failed. Only in Birmingham did it stimulate an increase in Brewing Victualling.

Consumption did grow after 1830, for a number of reasons, but growth was fitful. The 1840s were a terrible decade known as the Hungry Forties. The 1850s saw an advance in growth of money wages, and with little else to spend it on the working classes spent it on drink, whilst the period between 1860 and 1874 was one of protracted economic boom. In the latter part of the century the position was reversed and the 1880s and 1890s were years of depression. When real wages did increase, however, the proportion spent on alcohol did not, largely because of an increase in alternative consumables - notably tea - and leisure activities, but also because of increased Temperance activity and also because prices of goods other than beer were falling.

By the start of the 20thC the trade as whole were in no doubt that they were looking at, and powerless in the face of, a long term decline in beer consumption. The Managing Director of Greene King remarked in 1904 that there was a ‘tendency amongst the public not to use the public houses as formerly,’ and in the momentous year 1908 he was lamenting the ‘decreased consumption of drink amongst all classes.’ It was 1908, the high water mark of English Temperance, that saw 800,000 people take to the streets to protest against a Licensing Bill that would have closed one third of all English pubs and banned the employment of women as barmaids.

Declining sales combined with massive capital injections into the industry following the famous Guinness floatation of 1886 had caused a second rush to tied houses, which in turn forced a momentous wave of brewery mergers, takeover and closures, which sets the stage for the recognisably modern situation where a brewery and its beers are worth less than the volume of its tied estate.

The 1830s didn’t just see an explosion in the number of retail outlets. They saw a change in the popular taste. A witness to the 1833 Committee on the Sale of Beer noted that the London drinker –

Will have nothing but what is Mild, and that has caused a considerable revolution in the trade, so much so that Barclay Perkins, and other great houses, finding that there is a decrease in the consumption of Porter, and an increase in the consumption of ale, have gone into the ale trade, nearly all the new trade is composed of Mild Ale.”

Until the 1870s Porter stayed the capital’s favourite tipple, but it, too, was now lighteand matured for a shorter period. Increasingly it was vying with sweeter Mild for the popular palate, the best of which was recognised as coming from Mann, Crossman & Paulin, but Watney’s and Charringtons were amongst the leading London firms. There were many others

Burton Pale Ales arrived in increasing quantities after the construction of the railway line in 1839, They, plus London Mild ales had o sooner had Mild ales outstripped London Porter than there was another change in public taste.

After 1880 – and possibly due to a lightening in weight of the beers as a result of relaxations in the user of sugar and even maize, as well as other technological innovations centred around cooling and refrigeration – the public started to show a marked preference for a lighter, brighter draught beer. Made more rapidly they were known as Running Ales – what we today would call real ale - and their popularity went hand in hand with an increase in the popularity of bottled beer; a trend that was only reversed by the exigencies of the First World War. Interestingly the interwar period also saw a significant increase in bottled beer consumption, in turn reversed by WW11. 2010 was, I believe, the first year that more than 50% of domestic consumption was accounted for by the off-trade. Could it be that this is the culmination of a trend that was set in train 130 years ago?

A consequence of this trend was undoubtedly an increasing homogenisation of beers as brewers everywhere sought to make Pale Ales and bottled beers that emulated the much desired properties of Burton beers. The London brewers themselves opened breweries in Burton, so that by the last quarter of the 19thC, Burton has eclipsed London as the locus of British brewing, and by this time, of course, even very modest breweries were now able to brew all year round, which removed the need to brew strong winter keeping ales. The public did not seem to miss them.

In addition the work of Pasteur and Hansen was making the job of the brewer less of a hit and miss affair, and this in turn allowed a weakening of the beer without increased concern for its stability. It no longer became advisable to adjust recipes according to the time of the year , and the microscope’s lessons concerning hygiene again made it possible to lighten and weaken the beer offered for sale without increasing the risk to the brewer. The public - the new commuting middle classes in particular - embraced lighter and weaker whenever the opportunity arose.

Reductions in strength caused by the Napoleonic Wars had caused people to demand stronger Porters once the national emergency was over and consequently Stout was developed to satisfy a more traditional taste. Porter brewing in London was effectively killed off by the Great War, leaving the Stout market entirely in the hands of the Irish. There was no serious or permanent demand for a reversion to pre-war beer strengths as there had been in the post-Napoleonic era. Technological advances had rendered them unnecessary from the point of view of protecting beer quality.

To conclude, I am conscious that I have missed out vast areas of discussion about London Brewing. The financial structure of the industry, and the peculiar capital demands of the Porter brewers, the significance of the railways, Temperance, the 1908 Act, the impact of the Burton brewers and their agency system on the London Market. All of which are seminar topics in themselves. I am also conscious that my talk has been light on statistics. The alternative was a richness of statistics that I did not believe would enlighten.

My concern here has been to show that the history of London brewing in the 18thC in particular has been a quest. A search for a product that is both affordable and stable enough to be fulfil its function of dietary staple in a modernising city in transition towards industrialisation. Ever increasing economies of scale were what the conditions of a densely populated and thirsty metropolis demanded and only the Porter brewers were able to satisfy that demand, as well as generate one third of the national revenue and maintain a price stability that lasted for many people’s entire lives, a task they would have found considerably easier were it not for repeated and protracted wars with the French.

Once the technologies – not of measurement, but of control – were developed and made available to ale brewers in London, Burton and the countryside, the writing was on the wall both for London Porter and London as the brewing capital of the world. If everyone now wanted beer that tasted like it had come from Burton, why not make it in Burton. When the technologies of transport could do for distribution what the technologies of control did for production and when the populace no longer wanted a beer that tasted of London because you could only make it in London, why, if like Youngs, you have lost your soul, would you even need to be in the centre of the capital at all?

London now has some 14 breweries in it, a larger number than any time during any of our lifetimes. There is an undeniable renaissance in London brewing, and to their great credit, London’ sole great survivor Fuller’s are as much at the vanguard as more likely candidates such as Meantime or Kernal. I have attempted to explore the extent to which London brewing has been characterised by historical inevitability. Your job as beer bloggers is to explain what is happening now in the light of what has gone before.

Beer Bloggers See the Lightsstruck

I’ve just come from the beer tasting panel seminar at the Beer Bloggers Conference, where a number of common off-flavours in beer were demonstrated to the assembled beer bloggers. I asked a question about ‘lightstruck’ or ‘skunked’ beer, namely, since the science behind this flavour fault is understood (UV light reacting with hop compounds), why do brewery companies persist in doing the one thing that is guaranteed to cause this fault: packaging beer into clear glass bottles.
A representative from Shepherd Neame told me that it was because people drink with their eyes and that beer in clear glass bottles sold more, and that in their Whitstable Bay beer lightstruck was a component of the flavour profile.

At this point beer bloggeuse Melissa Cole waded in on my side asking him whether if he was really happy to make his product inferior in order to sell more of it. A marketing guy , whose name badge I didn’t see, then waded in to say that his company - and it must have been a large one - had commissioned market research about their beer brand (in a clear glass bottle) and this told them that 50% of people couldn’t detect lightstruck and of those who could 25% liked it as it reminded them of foreign holidays. This, he seemed to think was a clincher. If the consumer likes it it must be alright.

I just admit I was flummoxed for a second or two and then the moment had passed. He had a point, but not a very good one. Sure there is nothing wrong with supplying what the customer wants, but that wasn’t what he was saying. He was saying the consumer likes it so it’s good. No it isn’t.
OK, a lot of people like his lightstruck beer. So what? A lot of people like KFC; but the people at KFC don’t pretend they’re practicing haute cuisine. A lot of French winemakers make vin de pays. There’s nothing wrong with that. What they don’t do is pretend that it’s in the same league as Bordeaux. Shepherd Neame’s conference man and the big brewery marketing man are claiming that their lightstruck beer is as good as any non-lightstruck beer because sufficient numbers of consumers who don’t understand the quality issue at stake like it. Sorry guys. This won’t do. Your beer is inferior, and here’s why.

No brewery in the world, to the best of my knowledge deliberately lightstrikes its beer. No one has an ‘in-line lightstriker’. They don’t keep it in the brewery until it is sufficiently lightstruck to make it confirm to its ‘flavour profile’. They make a normal beer but just don’t care if it does get lightstruck provided it sells. Therefore when you buy a bottle it may or may not be lightstruck, which means it is inconsistent.

I’ve never met anyone in the brewing industry who didn’t accept that consistency is the sine qua non of beer quality. Until today, maybe. If Mr Shepherd Neame Representative says that lightstruck is a characteristic of his Whitstble Bay beer and you then buy a bottle that miraculously hasn’t picked up this flavour fault then it must be outside specification, and consequently wrong from his point of view. We’re moving into a surreal world are we not?

In short, whether or not lightstruck is liked or disliked by the public, beer that packaged to be susceptible to skunking is, by definition, inconsistent and inconsistent beer is inferior. Ergo beer in clear glass is inferior.

In the beer world we are constantly being exhorted to look to the world of wine for inspiration as to how to promote beer or improve its image. Well here’s a good opportunity to take a leaf from that book. Not all wine is equal. Vin de Pays is inferior to Vintage Bordeaux, for the same reason that the best KFC outlet is never going to win a MIchelin star. French winemakers and fast-order chefs everywhere accept this. Why then do we have to pretend that all beers are intrinsically equal? They are not.

May it Rain on Your Parade

William Saxe Coburg Gotha has decided that he does not want beer served at his wedding this week.Not only is it incredible that it is even thinkable to celebrate a national event without our national drink, but it is depressing that our future king is so ignorant of his own national history (the English one as well as the German one for that matter) that it even occurs to him that such a slap in the face for our way of life is even acceptable.

SHAME ON YOU both for peing a po-faced snob and for not knowing that this nation is built on beer.

I was commiserating that the forecast for the wedding day is so bloody awful. Now I am delighted it is set to piss on your parade. It is no more than you deserve.

Bastard Budget 2011

At Budget time Chancellors are always blind to the brewing industry. They make claims, like George Osborne did two days ago, that their budgets are good for Britain and good for British industry.

Well brewing is a British industry. In fact, once upon a time, it was Britain's biggest industry. It helped create the capital to make Britain the most dynamic economy the world had ever seen. However, brewing is a 'making things industry' and there hasn't been a British Chancellor insterested in one of those for many a long year.

So what did Osborne do, he put up beer duty by 7.2% meaning that as a tax beer duty has now risen by 33% since 2008. Does this raise more money for the cash-strapped through its own incompetence Treasury? No.

Why not? Because, as has been pointed out by research by the Society of Independent Brewers, the British Beer and Pubs Association, the Morning Advertiser, the Publican and the British Food and Beverage Industries Suppliers' Association, the point has long been passed when increasing beer duty increases the revenues from beer duty.

The driver behind this tax increase - entirely unremarked by the usual Budget pundits - is not financial but moral. There is a prohibitionist tendency within the Department of Health that believes that the public finances would be improved if we all drank less. They seem to have captured the Treasury.

If you read my previous blog entry (go on, be the first), you will see that this view is bollocks. Prof De Witte explained to the MPs (and the DoH, who were present) that an alcohol problem reduction policy that was based purely on price failed to address the principal causes of problem drinking,which were much more related to problems within the family than they were to the price of 'alcohol'.

The reason your pint of beer is more expensive than it should be is that the Treasury is entirely immune to reason on the subject of beer duty and, to use the Whitehall jargon, is totally 'captured' by the DoH agenda.

Sadly the logic behind the DoH agenda is also bollocks. It says, quite simply, "if you and everyone else you know had drunk less George Best would still be alive."

Let's put it another way, your pint is more expensive that it should be because the government believss that while you may be a decent bloke the cahp next to you who drinks one will have a chronic nut-type allergy.

Be afraid. The DoH is captured by zealots lost in shoddy thinking. Be very afraid. The Treasury believe want they.

Alcohol - At Last - A Ray of Truth

A very small bomb exploded on Wednesday night in Committee Room 17 of the House of Commons, but no one was hurt and no guards came running. In fact no one seemed to notice at all.

It happened at a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group when Professor Philippe De Witte*, speaking in that kind of Flemish accent that just radiates expertise, proceeded, with the aide of a handout that covered no more than two sides of A4, to reveal the British government’s approach to the issue of alcohol management to be both wrong and pointless.

10% of the population are problem drinkers, he said. Recent policies have reduced overall alcohol consumption in society and the result of that reduction in consumption is that 10% of the population are problem drinkers. That figure is intractable and the reasons that people end up in that 10% are complex and varied, but – and hold on to your hats here – are nothing to do with price.

British governments, of whatever hue, have only one approach to the issue of drink related problems; the fiscal approach. In this the Treasury is backed up by the Department of Health who, in turn, swallow whole the logic of bodies like Alcohol Concern. The result is a policy direction based on the premise that if we had all only drunk a little less then George Best would still be alive. This argument is clearly stupid. However it is the position the government takes and continues to take in the face of continued failure.

Now at first glance the maxim ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again’ is uplifting and admirable, but if the thing you are trying for is patently absurd then, like attempting to push water uphill, the repeated effort is also absurd. Much better the maxim of that much underrated philosopher W.C Fields. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, give up. There’s no point in being a damn fool.’

The government, however, stubbornly refuses to accept that there is an alternative to constantly raising taxes on beer, despite their being no evidence that this policy works and plenty of evidence that it has no effect on ameliorating problem drinking at all. The reverse is true, if the 10% figure is indeed intractable, meaning that problem drinkers will continue to consume the same levels of alcohol regardless of price, then raising taxes is harmful to those in their families who then find the overall disposable income of the family unit declines as alcohol spend goes up.

The remaining 90% of us, for whom alcohol consumption is not and never will be a problem, must find that our pleasures in life must continually rise in price in the name of a belief that is dogmatic rather than practical. Our government really is of an incredibly poor quality.
Professor de Witte confirmed what many us instinctively know, especially if we have ever spent time in Europe. Issues surrounding alcohol misuse are ‘not a question of price’, they ‘are a question of education.’ Moreover, ‘in Europe alcohol is inside the culture of the family. In the UK it is outside,’ and ‘in the UK children don’t know how to drink alcohol.’

The quotes are directly from Professor de Witte to the MP’s present. They also heard from Chris Sporek, Chief Executive of Drinkaware [an independent trust which brings together both the alcohol industry and the health community]. His view from the moral high ground of the nanny state I won’t comment on. Frankly, it makes me want to tear down the entire apparatus of the established order.

* Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Foundation for Alcohol Research (EARB).

Beer and Britannia - A Talk to the Mile End Group

I've been asked to publish the text of a sppech I gave to the Mile End Group Christmas Party on Monday 6th December. I am flattered and delighted to do so, even at the risk of blowing my cover. Here it is.

MEG Talk – December 6^th  - 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.

Blanking Banking

In an engagingly frank piece on the Evening Standard Comment page of September 16^th, City Editor Chris Blackhurst noted that ‘the bankers are still in situ . . . doing what they were doing before the downturn hit and behaving exactly as they did before.’ He goes on. ‘The authorities are pretty powerless to do anything about it,’ and ‘they [the bankers] can move forward in the knowledge that they’re seen as too important to fail.’

Now apart from Brian Sewell and the killer Sudoku, Mr Blackhurst is about the only thing worth reading in the poor old ES, but even so the correct response to this revelation is, ‘No shit, Sherlock!’

There may be a parallel universe where the regulatory authorities have done what is necessary to prevent a rerun of 2008, but its consideration is more for the pages of New Scientist than the poor old ES. In the generally rather wonderful universe that we must inhabit no change was precisely all the change that most of us expected. Hence the anger about which Mr Blackhurst based his article.

Bankers are still terrifically Thatcherite. By which I mean that like Mrs. T – or the Evil Snow Queen, as I prefer to call her – they profess to champion the ideals of the ‘market’, but, when push comes to shove would rather not trust to it (as that nice Mr Cable said in his conference speech on Septmber 22nd). Take bankers' salaries for instance. We are told they must be stratospheric otherwise the best will go elsewhere. OK then, let us just apply the laws of the market. Increase the supply of the best and the demands driving excessive payments will fall.

One way you could do this is to scrap tuition fees for degree courses that turn out people that tend to end up in banking. These people would leave university less debt burdenend, consequently their initial needed salaries would be lower and their increased numbers would also exert a deflationary effect.

Of course this raises the question of whether the British education system is capable of turning out sufficient quantities of the best, the sheer over-representation of non-doms in the banking sector suggests that the market in bankers is suffering some profound structural weaknesses. However, in theory there is no reason why this country should not be able to train sufficient numbers of people to work in  the banking sector, after all many of the people I share public transport with daily already have a significant pre-qualification for a career in banking; viz an obvious and complete absence of any moral compass.