The Dog That Didn't BarkHow CAMRA's silence on the drink-driving issue could have betrayed much of what the organisation had fought for The UK's 80 mg drink-driving limit has become so generally accepted that it is well-nigh impossible to find any responsible individual or body prepared to argue publicly that it was too low. However, a wide range of authoritative voices spoke out against the reduction from 80 mg to 50 mg that was proposed in the government's 1998 consultation paper, including motoring organisations, several chief police officers, the Brewers and Licensed Retailers Association and most of the national newspapers. Fortunately, the government have now made a firm decision not to implement the proposal. The one body whose name was conspicuous by its absence in the list of those who opposed the planned reduction in the limit was CAMRA. This may seem surprising, as it represented by far the gravest threat to both pubs and real ale in the lifetime of the organisation. However, the national leadership - specifically John Cryne, Dave Goodwin and Bob Jones - decided that the issue was just too difficult and controversial, and should therefore remain outside CAMRA's remit, arguing that they could be accused of putting pubs before lives. But of course the responsible argument against it is emphatically not one of trading pubs against lives - it is that it would be counter-productive, doing nothing to deter the hard core offenders who cause the overwhelming majority of drink-related accidents, and diverting police resources away from targeting that hard core, while at the same time alienating law-abiding people and eroding respect for the law. I do not suggest that CAMRA should have mounted a high-profile campaign against the plan, as this obviously would have been open to misinterpretation. But there is no reason why CAMRA would have lost any credibility by lending its name to the very responsible and well-argued paper produced by the Brewers and Licensed Retailers - indeed it might have gained respect with both pubgoers and the licensed trade. Even if they were not prepared to state their opposition directly, they could at least have urged the government to take into account the potential effect on pubs, as their consultation document signally failed to do. But there is no sign that CAMRA even tried to assess the impact of the change in the law either on the pub trade or on its own activities. By adopting such a head-in-the-sand attitude, they were betraying much of what the organisation has campaigned over the years to defend. After a couple of months, any further discussion of the issue in CAMRA's monthly newspaper "What's Brewing" was prevented, even though, as stated above, it represented the most serious threat to both pubs and real ale in the lifetime of the campaign. The national leadership should have been under no illusions that a limit reduction would only have a marginal effect on the current pub scene. Whether or not accompanied by mandatory driving bans for drivers in the 50-80 mg range, within a generation it would effectively wipe out the British pub as we know it today. It would be cut back to a rump of urban bars mainly aimed at young people, with a few places remaining outside town centres that might vaguely resemble pubs but in reality functioned entirely as restaurants. The Chef & Brewer chain is a chilling pointer to the way forward. The prospects for real ale and microbreweries in that environment would be limited in the extreme. And, if rather more real pubs did survive outside urban centres than this pessimistic prediction suggests, it would only be because sufficient people were prepared to break the law to visit them. Fortunately, that will not now be put to the test in the next few years.
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