This might be labouring the point. But a vast and bovine media herd continues to swallow whole and passively regurgitate the arrant soufflé of a story that Westminster Council, in a frenzy of un-British, puritan fervour, intends to force alcohol consumers in Soho, Mayfair and Covent Garden to sit down while they’re doing it or be run out of town. It has become a public duty to continue pointing out that no such thing is planned.
Friday’s On London Extra has already demonstrated that Conservative-run Westminster Council’s draft statement of licensing policy had been out there since late June, bothering no one but the opposition Labour group (and even them not all that much). Only when a credulous Guardian decided that an innocuous and routine clause about encouraging more drinking with meals and less stand-up boozing in pubs near people’s homes with the aim of reducing nuisance and obnoxious conduct on the street was a threat to our essence as a nation.
The same line is being taken by Reform UK. The government has piled in too, its press office providing a robo-quote we should interpret as, in effect, a Mr Andrew Burnham announcing, yet again, “I’m working-class, me”. But no amount of churnalist ploys for “keeping the story going” alters the inconvenient fact that the draft document in question comes nowhere even close to proposing a ban, a purge or even a major curb of the liberty of people in Westminster to down pints of beer in licensed premises while standing up at the same time. And if what is being proposed is such a scandal now, why hasn’t it been before?
Measures to address the downsides of bulk “vertical drinking” are nothing new in the licensing policies of Westminster, or other places. The council’s draft new policy, if adopted, will replace the one that’s been in effect since October 2021, which contains six references to “vertical drinking” – compared with just three in the draft new one – and makes the same sorts of points, often using very similar words.
“The council wishes to discourage drunkenness and to encourage the provision of more seating in premises which serve alcohol for people to sit and enjoy a drink and order food by table service,” says its clause B5 – language very adjacent to that used in the new draft, which has been presented as a monstrous new constraint on the sacred social good of wild and free inebriation.
The 2021 policy is wholly candid about encouraging “change in the composition of Westminster’s evening and night-time economy so that it becomes more widely based and less dominated by alcohol led premises.” Five years on, the draft new one is equally so. It wasn’t new in 2021 either. The Londoner, in an excellent dissection of the confected furore, quotes an expert on licensing law: “It’s been reported as if it’s a new policy, but it’s 20 years old. There’s nothing new in the policy, it’s just a re-publication.” What’s “the story” here, again, newshounds?
The otherwise almost entirely sorry state of reporting about the West End’s hospitality sector, and Soho’s in particular, is in need of additional antidotes. On London has one under construction.
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