It seems to me entirely possible that this general election will mark
the demise of the Labour Party as a party of government. It could be reduced to
the status of a left-wing protest group that is more concerned with its own
ideological purity than with making the compromises necessary to widen its
electoral appeal and actually win elections. This is a development which should
concern all who believe that representative democracy requires a choice between
two or more political parties that are at least electable, even if you don’t
necessarily agree with their policy approach.
Since the financial crisis of 2008 the central political question for
Europe has been: Will the political centre hold? Or will we see populist or
extremist parties gaining power because they have fooled their electorates into
believing there can be simple solutions to complex problems. The election of
Macron in France and defeat of Le Pen; the defeat of Geert Wilders in Holland
and, I anticipate, the re-election of Angela Merkel in Germany does suggest
that it will hold.
But in all these countries there are credible political parties of
centre-right and centre-left to the parties that have actually won. Not so in
the UK. The Liberal Democrats appear not to be making a breakthrough by
attracting the votes of sensible Labour supporters that want to vote for a
centre-left party as opposed to a bunch of Trots. So, what we could see after
the election is not just a landslide Tory victory, but a Tory government whose
only effective political opposition may come from within its own ranks.
Meanwhile, what does Labour have to say about pubs and alcohol? For
starters, Diane Abbott, Labour’s shadow Home Secretary is a dedicated
anti-alcohol zealot, but all of a sudden Labour seems to have woken up to the
scale of pub closures by pledging “We will set up a National Review of Local
Pubs to examine the causes for the large-scale demise of pubs.” They might
start by looking at their own 2005 manifesto which promised to legislate to
ensure that all enclosed public places and workplaces – other than licensed
premises – would be smoke-free. The exception would be restaurants and food-led
pubs that would be smoke-free, but wet-led pubs and members’ clubs would have a
choice. Labour rebels conspired to ensure that those exemptions were not in the
legislation and we ended-up with the smoking ban - which has done a huge amount
to damage pubs and beer sales. Jeremy Corbyn voted for these measures and is
not in any position to preside over an objective review of why over 11,000 pubs
closed between 2007 and 2013 – even in the remotely unlikely event that Labour
is elected.
So, what might alcohol policy look like after the election in what
will effectively be an elective dictatorship? Historically, the Conservatives
were generally much more sympathetic to the trade in beverage alcohol, and did
much to defend its interests from the 1870s onwards; and it was thanks to the
opposition of Conservative peers in the House of Lords that the attempt by the
Liberal government of Herbert Asquith to close 30,000 of the nation’s 96,000
pubs over 14 years, and nationalise the rest was defeated.
The Conservative-led coalition government, formed after the 2010
general election, promised some radical supply-side changes to the way in which
the sale of alcohol was regulated: a review of alcohol policy which led to the
introduction of EMAROs and the Late Night Levy; banning below-cost sales of
alcohol; and tackling underage drinking. In 2012 the Conservatives were minded
to go further and to introduce minimum unit pricing – a policy that had long
been championed by the health lobby and that had passed into law in Scotland,
albeit not been implemented due to legal challenge.
However, attempts at introducing EMAROs have been thwarted by
concerted and unified opposition from the trade and the late night levy has so
far been introduced by only eight local authorities, and moreover, the policy
has been panned by the recent House of Lords review of the Licensing Act 2003.
Then we saw what the health lobby regarded as a great betrayal:
minimum pricing was abandoned by the Conservative-led coalition government, or
at least kicked into the long grass for lack of evidence regarding its
efficacy, and with the convenient excuse that we should in any event await the
outcome of the legal challenge to minimum pricing in Scotland that will be
resolved by our own Supreme Court at a hearing on July 24-25 this year. Minimum
pricing was also contrary to the Conservative ideological opposition to
anything that compromised free markets, and faced considerable opposition
within Conservative ranks for that reason, as well as the more pragmatic
opposition that arose out of the need to avoid measures that raised prices and gave
ammunition to Labour charges of a “cost of living crisis.”
We can but hope that the traditional Conservative opposition to price
fixing and market regulation, combined with the huge amount of work to
implement Brexit, will mean that alcohol policy in the new one-party state is
something they just won’t find time for.
