New Towns and Licences
Few measures have been assailed by a heavier battery of bad arguments than the Licensing Bill which got its second reading in the House of Commons on Tuesday. It was attacked (mainly by propagandists outside the House) as providing for the nationalisation of the drink traffic ; it, of course, proposes nothing of the sort. It was attacked by one Conservative speaker after another as a Socialist manoeuvre to create a local monopoly in public-houses ; Horne
Secretaries in wholly or predominantly Conservative Governments cheerfully and beneficially administered local monopolies in public- houses in the Carlisle, Annan and Cromarty areas in all but three of the twenty-nine years between 1916, when the State Management experiment in those areas was initiated, and 1945. The real hostility to the measure, of course, comes not from the individual licensed victualler, but from the brewers, who, having, added to their original business of brewing the wholesale acquisition of licensed houses in order to create in each a monopoly for their own liquor, are bent on establishing that system in the new towns. The Government pro-. posal, which provides for disinterested management—the manager of a house getting a commission on the food or non-intoxicating liquor he sells, but none on intoxicants—is a great improvement on that. The Carlisle experiment when it was- started set new standards, to which the brewers' public-houses had in due course to conform. The system in the new towns must do the same. That means that it must be no mere copy of the Carlisle experiment, but a definite improvement on it. It will be years yet before much of the new towns is built. The Home Secretary of the day will have to use his imagination, and from the very. first consult local interests fully and devote a fair share of the public house profits to local causes. Subject to those conditions, the extension of the Carlisle experiment to the new towns is thoroughly sound, whether some further exten- sion follows eventually or not.
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