You've not been to the pub yet have you? The price of creating fear.

So I'm having a haircut, first since February, and chatting to the barber. I've known him since he opened his first barbers over the road from my house about 20 years ago. We were (I suspect like plenty of others) talking lightly about the current pandemic, its effect on businesses and on behaviour.

"So, Simon. You been to the pub yet?"

"Yep, I was there on the first day they re-opened."

The chat continued in this vein - the barber was in the same camp as me but a little concerned about getting caught in a local lockdown (and the resulting closing of his business again). But he confirmed to me a feature of this re-opening - that a lot of people are putting off going back to the pub or out to a restaurant: "going to leave it a bit" seems to be a common response. It is interesting too that this attitude seems to be more prevalent among younger people, the sort who you'd expect to provide the bedrock of business for a lot of pubs and restaurants.

I'd had this sort of conversation with others - Jo who runs The George in Cullingworth said it had been really quiet since they re-opened (we were there for a meal) and the people who I play RPGs with on-line are all mostly in the "I'm not risking it yet" camp. None of these folk are in the "Anybody Going to a Pub is a Terrible Person who Will Bring About a Second Peak" category you witness on social media sites but they all pretty much buy the idea that the second peak is a real, even likely thing, and therefore sitting home for a while longer is the way to go.

Hardly a day passes without another report of a high street restaurant or pub chain going into liquidation, receivership or announcing restructuring. Just today my local paper had two of these - from Bistrot Pierre and the owners of Pizza Express and Zizzi. We've seen pub chains close, restaurants shuttered and fast food groups clobbered. The hope had been that, once we were allowed out to eat and drink, even with the 'social distancing' controls, the result would be a flood of custom for these businesses. It hasn't happened and I fear for the future of many, for the livelihoods of thousands, and for the job prospects of millions.

Twitter though can always be relied on for a unique take on not going out to a pub or a restaurant. I challenged one person who tweeted this from their Cornish holiday let: "(w)ell, we don’t want to go inside pubs or restaurants, so we’ll make our own private bar and eating area for the week". I observed that this seemed to reflect the triumph of fear and would mean pubs and restaurants dying and got this back:


So somebody who isn't ill or affected by this virus decides not to go out for a meal when on holiday because other people might be frightened? And it's like saving the planet (or something). Anyway I asked for an explanation because it didn't make sense for someone who wasn't fearful, wasn't in a risk category and wasn't ill to stay at home to "minimise" their impact.



Got it? If you read the words it is clear that this isn't about compassion at all but about avoiding people whose "lives may be serious(ly) impacted by this virus". You can, if you like, see this as 'love and compassion' but it looks to me like a strange rationalising of what can only be called fear - fear of catching the virus, fear of the 'second peak'. And it is this fear that, right now, presents an existential threat to businesses like pubs, cafes, bars and restaurants plus all people who supply them and the jobs of people who work in them.

If we want a high street left, if we want the local pub to stay open, if we want seaside cafes and country inns, then at some point we have to stop being scared witless at the prospect of either getting the virus or creating this much talked of 'second peak'. What we see though is inconsistency everywhere - from ministers, oppostition, media and public bodies. The roadside is still brightened by flashing signs telling us to stay at home, local councils issue portentious press statements about how it's not safe out there, and ministers flip flop between get back to normal and don't go out if you don't have too it's bad out there. All urged on by opposition and media more interested in news ratings or opinion polling than the future of high street businesses, pubs, bars and restaurants.

I write this, not to have a go at those who fear going back to the pub, but to get across that our leaders - public, business, cultural - need to step up and start getting people to reassess the basis of their fears. The personal risk from the virus is very small right now (not nothing and the thing hasn't burnt itself out) especially if you are young and healthy, but near every public pronouncement is couched in terms designed to reinforce the heightened level of worry and fret created to ensure high levels of compliance with lockdown and social distancing. Until officials, ministers, councillors and media folk start saying it's safe - or at least that your chance of getting infected with the virus is very small and the chance of you being very ill with it smaller still - then we'll continue to see people opting for a rickety table and some canvass chairs on a patio rather than a little local restaurant or the corner benches in the pub round the corner. And that restuarant and the pub may just end up going bust.

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Lockdown Living - in which the Resolution Foundation discover (and then ignore) London's housing crisis

 The Resolution Foundation has published some work looking at what they call "Lockdown Living", essentially a brief review of housing conditions in the UK:

We show that living conditions in lockdown have been determined by long-term housing trends such as tenure change, the failure to build sufficient social-housing stock and weak regulation of the private-rented sector. As we face the prospect of local lockdowns or even a second wave going into the winter months, both short- and long-term action to address the inequalities uncovered here is needed more than ever before.

What the Resolution Foundation find shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone with more than the passing appreciation of housing issues in the UK. We're told that poorer people live in less good, more overcrowded conditions and that older people tend to have more living space than younger people. Unsurprisingly, given the age and social profile of BAME communities - younger, poorer - these groups are more likely to be in poor homes (Resolution Foundation use damp as their test here) and more likely to be overcrowded.

The report makes few recommendations (suggesting, for example, that opening playgrounds, libraries and leisure centre especially in more deprived areas would ease pressures from lockdown) but points to several problems within our system such as changing tenures and how this impacts on health and well-being. The authors, however, remain stuck with the belief that the resolution to housing issues such as those they describe lie in more regulation and more state-controlled housing provision. At no point to they try to understand how it is that the well-being of owner occupiers is so much better than that of renters (both social and private sector).

It is notable too that no attmept is made by the authors to understand geographical factors in their findings. We read that BAME people are more likely to live in overcrowded conditions, less likely to have a garden, and more likely to live in a damp home. Clearly a concern but the Resolution Foundation should also have noted that 55% of the UK's BAME population lives in London which also has much higher levels of private renting, high rise living and poor quality social housing.

Similarly, having noted how over 55s have much more living space, the authors don't then also recognise that this is what might be called an "empty nest" effect brought about by young people leaving home for work or study rather than a direct consequence of intergenerational housing inequality. There's also a geographical issue here since London has a much younger age profile than the rest of the UK and further that the Resolution Foundation's use of unadjusted income skews the findings since average London incomes are much higher than much of the rest of the UK.

It's good that this work is done although the Resolution Foundation could be a lot less 'glass half empty' in its presentation. The problem, however, is simply not a function of PRS regulation or the lack of funding for social housing for all that some changes here would be desirable. The problem is London. Every single measure that the report uses reflects the crisis within London's housing - overcrowding reflects a (social and private) rental market dominated by flats, damp homes the overwhelming of environmental health enforcement by the sheer numbers of private rented properties, and the loss of wellbeing by the fact that 'thirtysomethings' in London stay renting because they can't afford to buy.

It's almost certainly the case that the young and less well-off have, in terms of day-to-day living, suffered worse under lockdown - the "lockdown is lovely" crowd were mostly well-heeled retirees outside London with nice homes and gardens in smart market towns not stressed immigrant families in a London high-rise or young professionals trying to work from home on a wobbly IKEA desk in the corner of a bedroom. But stripped of the emotive messaging, what we see from the report is further evidence that London does not begin to meet the housing needs of many of its residents and that the only way to meet these needs is to build more family housing. Enough that, over time, we can get back to the conditions of those 'thirtysomethings' parents and have family homes affordable to people on average pay.

Spending lots of money on new social housing (which is unlikely to be family housing in London) or badgering government into new rent regulations might seem like a good idea but, in reality, it's using an inadequate sticking plaster to cover over the damage done by the lack of housing land supply in the South East and London. Without the wholesale reform of our strategic planning system to free up five- or ten-times more land for housing, the problems found by the Resolution Foundation will persist.

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The 'new normal' is a victory for public sector fussbuckets and worrywarts. I hate it.

Between the rain showers, we went for a walk yesterday. Our route took us, pretty much, round the edge of the village and we ran into a few folk, had a few conversations. it was pleasant and, as we stepped back home, the sun was shining, birds sang and it all seemed pretty good. A fine June day you might say.

I got to thinking about those conversations and some of the things people said make me worry. Not one friend we met whose business has been completely trashed by the lockdown and associated restrictions - "we're not expecting to have any business at all this year" was the rough analysis. I suspect this message will be repeated again and again as small businesses in hospitality, entertainment, events management and travel ponder a future that is probably more terrifying than the folk planning our post-coronavirus world imagine.

No it's not just these folk or the thousands of small traders - shops, pubs, market stalls, concert venues and suppliers to all these good folk - who will shut up shop because they can't make the ongoing restrictions work for their business and their customers. Lot's of people will watch as their big national and multinational competitors, often those who've agitated for ongoing restrictions, suck up business while they wonder where their next work is coming from. Pub landlords will look in anger at Wetherspoons opening their huge cavernous boozers, able to run table service apps and queuing systems that are literally impossible for a little local pub.

No it's not just these folk, nor is it the annoyance at Bradford council badging Goit Stock falls as a top ten destination when there's no parking, no provision for visitors. It's a great place and I love it but the villages can't cope when hundred's arrive from across the North because the Council thoughtlessly describes it as a place to visit, a destination. This is the same Council that closed all its parks for no good reason, has done nothing to open its museums and galleries, and prefers virtue-signalling with coloured lights on City Hall to helping local folk get on.

But no, it's not that either. The thing that troubled me most was a throwaway remark - "we'll lose all the benefits of lockdown". I didn't say anything but, you know, there are a whole lot of people out there who think lockdown is great. From the "nature is healing" nutcases through to those who like the fact that travel restrictions, closed pubs and silenced cafes made their village "more peaceful". I worry that these voices, along with a new collection of people made terrified of every cough or sniffle, will prevail and the restrictions will remain.

The 'new normal' they call it. A world with a new set of petty restrictions and controls. A whole new bunch of rules for the worst sort of local councillor to get excited about enforcing. An avalanche of regulations, bans and vaguely worded control orders for police and pretend police to wave in the faces of people doing nothing worse than enjoying themselves in what jumped up jobsworths and worrywarts think is the wrong way or at the wrong time.

We'll see a load more access and parking restrictions making city centres the exclusive playground of their own residents rather than destinations. Or, in the case of failing centres like Bradford, a desert of empty shops, increasingly derelict buildings and half-let offices, all interspersed by the grand regeneration projects funded by slabs of central government cash or rash unsistainable council borrowing. Projects that allow local leaders to pretend that it's all fine, that the place isn't dying, and that this magic bit of government cash will make all the difference.

The high status public sector people in towns like Bradford will cluster round the few remaining successes, telling each other that this is the start of a renaissance, that it's all great, and that those pointing to the emptiness, decline and dereliction are just 'talking down the city'. And then the public sector elite return to their day jobs planning response to climate change, designing regulations and limits on business, and dreaming up new ways to marshal people so as to maintain "social distancing". There's no place in their world for the slightly rough suburban pub with its karaoke, quiz night and occasionally raucous behaviour. No place for cheap weddings or a tray of butties and pies for a funeral tea. No place for crowds (or at least not the wrong sort of crowds).

Everywhere I hear people telling me it won't be the same again. And every time I hear this, a little piece of me dies. The idea that we make illegal - regulate away - the pub filled to bursting on bonfire night or packed with happy football fans fills me with sadness. The thought that, as the rain breaks up a June day, people can't crowd into a high street cafe, laughing and buying cake while they wait for the skies to clear. This is the world those advocating a "new normal" want to destroy, all in the name of a hypothetical risk and the deranged idea that government can make us safe by regulation.

A semi-lockdown badged as the "new normal" will not merely destroy the leisure economy but will signal that only approved leisure and pleasure is allowed. Welcome to a world where a cafe is full with a dozen people, where theatres remove half their seats so they can open, where everyone is encouraged to wander round in jerry-built, home-made hazmat suits, and where the hug, the high five and the scrum at the bar on a Saturday night are things of the past. Welcome to a new authoritarian world filled with tracking apps, cameras, face recognition and thousands of gauleiters eager to help enforce this drab, soulless and depressing world.

So no, I don't want your 'new normal'. I will rebel where I can, campaign where I am able to get it changed and keep shouting that this is not right and is destroying so much that is good about our country. I would say that the government has failed us but the truth is that government always, regardless of rhetoric or supposed ideology, wants more controls, more limits and more power over the lives of ordinary people. Coronavirus gave those fussbuckets, worrywarts and jobsworths the chance to get these controls and they absolutely love it.

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