“Small business in
Chester is really getting behind small business Saturday this weekend. I have
delivered more than 400 packs to businesses telling them what it is all about.
Will the Minister commit to making an assessment of the success of
the first small business Saturday, so that we can improve and help small
business in future?” asked
Stephen Mosley in the Commons last month.
Mosley clearly claims to champion small businesses. He has
also been recognised as a “Beer Champion”,
an accolade which he prizes so highly that he has
let anyone who cares know via his website. So from this, the thought may
enter that Mosley is willing to weigh in on behalf of all those struggling
licensees, especially the ones under the cosh of the overbearing PubCos.
But that thought would be sadly misplaced: when PubCos are
mentioned, Chester’s MP is nowhere to be seen. As with so many right-leaning
politicians, he is happy to crow over his part in persuading The Rt Hon Gideon
George Oliver Osborne, heir to the Seventeenth Baronet, to scrap the beer duty
escalator, and take a whole penny a pint off that duty, but silent on the worst
offenders.
Because it is not the target of the dubiously talented array
of non-job holders at the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) – a 1p cut in
duty – that is killing pubs right now. As Zelo Street regulars will remember
from the
story of The Caledonia, that excellent street-corner local in Liverpool
that was sold from under its licensee and threatened with closure, it is the
PubCos that are causing the most closures.
PubCos, unlike brewers’ tied estates, mostly do not have the
incentive of selling beer, but of maximising the value of their property
portfolios. This they do by jacking up rents and then selling pubs off, even
when they are still going concerns, to cash in what are to them merely property
chips on a life-size Monopoly board. That the largest PubCos are carrying significant
debt merely hastens this behaviour.
Stephen Mosley has done nothing to oppose the appalling
practices of the PubCos. And for those of his constituents who frequent the many
fine pubs and bars of the City of Chester, this will come as no surprise: they
are unlikely to see him in any of them this side of hell freezing over. I can
say this with some confidence, having occasionally joined the excellent Chester Beer Project
survey team.
Mosley’s “Beer
Champion” boast is for the advancement of Himself Personally Now. If he’s
intervened in a single impending pub closure since being elected to Parliament
(the Greyhound in Saughall had already closed before he
noticed it) then it will come as news to anyone interested. His support for
small businesses is at best inconsistent, and at worst a sham.
Hopefully next year
voters will see through the veneer of self-promotion and bin him.
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