It seems Bradford South MP and Licensing Minister Gerry Sutcliffe is now supporting community run pubs – and choosing to make a fussa bout it.
Only earlier this month he was effectively fired as pubs minister after bungling the implementation of the Licensing Act. He has done so little for our local pubs that Gordon Brown has even had to appoint a seperate Pubs Minister to get the job done.
Now it seems Sutcliffe is leaking his colleagues ideas early in order to claim he has the answers to Bradford’s pubs crisis.
Community run pubs are nothing new, but it is absurd to think that hard working people and local communities can pick up the management an running of large scale local businesses across the city and replace an industry that is being decimated by punitive taxation and unfair competition from cut price beer sales by supermarkets.
Instead of messing around with old ideas that will only help a very small number of pubs at best, we need a real plan of action to put all our pubs back in business for good.
That means reforming the punitive taxation that is driving publicans out of business, reviewing the rules that tie landlords to high prices, abolishing the extra red tape brought in by Sutcliffe’s constant tinkering with the Licensing Act, and bringing in legislation to stop supermarkets driving pubs under by selling alcohol below cost price.
We also need a strong economy and that means a realistic plan to deal with the gorwing national debt, and a plan to reduce the burden of tax and red tape that ties local pub companies in knots.
Labour has run out of ideas and is driving more local businesses under every day.
