Punch Taverns versus that B&B

Unlike that Bed & Breakfast in Cookham, the case of the Greencoat Boy, a pub owned by Punch Taverns whose manager refused to serve the Labour Party's LGBT group recently, seems clear cut.  You may remember that I argued in the Cookham case that people operating their own businesses with their own capital should be able to deploy that capital how they chose and on whatever grounds, prejudiced or otherwise they wanted.

Punch Taverns is in a very different situation, however.  Whilst it is undeniably a private company, the nature of the business it is in means that it is strongly dependent on state privilege for its position.  It has enjoyed, over the years, massive "scarcity rents" - extraordinary profits and indeed property values by virtue of the state taking into its head that it should licence establishments that sell alcohol.  

Punch also grew out of a section of Bass Inns & Taverns, and so was tied closely to the fortunes of another heavily regulated sector - that of alcohol production and a brewer's tied estate went along hand in hand with its market penetration and so how big it grew, at least until the last Conservative government tried, and only partially succeeded, to break the "tie" between a brewer and its tenanted estate such that tenants and leaseholders were not allowed to offer beers from other suppliers.

And whilst arguably the Beer Orders of 1989 led to the decline of the big British brewers and their eventual disappearance to even larger international firms (often similarly privileged by their own governments), it enabled some of these big formerly tied estates to be hived off into very serious property companies.

In other words, the state's fingerprints are all over the reasons for the success (even if such has faded more recently) and dominance of these large pub chains, to the detriment of customers over the years (by enabling them to make scarcity-rents which are paid for ultimately by customers).  Since we all pay for the activities of the state and their consequences, in this case taxes for the bureaucracy involved in maintaining these privileged positions for the pubcos and brewers before them and in the higher prices the resulting scarcity rents have created, their operatives have no right to exclude anyone.

This is not about equalities legislation.  It's about the fact that these businesses are, or have been, created and sustained acts of state patronage and policy and market manipulation.

[I have a slight interest in this: my best friend's family were the then private owners of Atkinson's Brewery and its tied estate, which reversed into Mitchell & Butler's and his grandfather was the last "family" chairman of Bass when in the sixties M&B effectively reversed into Bass]

_{Image taken from the aptly, perhaps, named "Dead Pubs" website: Fair Use Claimed}