If this highway robbery continues I can see us being localless in the non too distant future.
Agreed - this is a very serious issue. There are, I believe, something like 30 pubs per week closing across the UK. But the main culprits are not the breweries, IMHO, but the Government, and the major supermarket chains. The Government, fuelled by the hysteria about binge drinking, keeps raising the tax on alcoholic drinks in an indiscriminate way, which is hitting very hard at pubs. When VAT was reduced last Monday, for example, they increased duty on booze so that it remains just just as expensive.
And the supermarkets are also to blame, because they are selling cheap beer and lager at 'loss leader' prices with which pubs can't compete. The Government could stop this, but they won't, for some reason (conspiracy theorists may have ideas, though!)
If you ask visitors from abroad what they like best about the UK, many of them say the pubs. But we are losing them fast, as we have already lost so many local shops and post offices. And when these places close, we lose meeting places which are a vital part of any real community. And once they have gone, we will never get them back.
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