An Ordinary Man's Thoughts on the Drink Question
IV.----Disinterested Management
NO principle of reform has attracted so much support in recent years as what is called disinterested management. The argument runs that if only you can eliminate the incentive to make private profit out of the sale of drink you will have drawn the sting from a dangerous trade. This kind of management, as I have already explained, means State ownership. The State would necessarily delegate the management to Boards or (as in Sweden) to supervised companies, but in the final analysis the State would be responsible and would take the praise or bear the blame in Parlia- ment.
I confess that when I first inquired into disinterested management I was overwhelmed by its attractiveness. Not being a Prohibitionist, yet believing that the drink trade still needed a great deal of reform, I saw in dis- interested management a perfect solution half-way between Prohibition and the present system. Further inquiry and experience has changed my opinion, and in this article I want to explain why.
It' is only fair to preface my remarks with a summary of the case for disinterested management. I will not trust to my own ability or impartiality to do this. I will quote from the little book Drink, by Lord Meston, who is an enthusiastic advocate of disinterested manage- ment :- "What it means is the elimination of all pr;vate profit from the sale of intoxicants, and thus of the inducement to press intoxicants upon the visitors to public houses, which is the curse of our present system. What it aims at is to accomplish at once, as it has been put, ' what the Licensing Justices would probably have taken more than a quarter of a century to do in the way of closing redundant and undesirable houses.' What it hopes to achieve is that, if liquor must be drunk, it will be consumed in pleasant surroundings which will not present it to the mind of the drinker as a hurried anodyne for his own misery ; that the public houses will offer to their visitors food and non-intoxicants as desirable alternatives to • strong drink ; and that there will be counter- attractions to the mere animal pleasure of boozing. In other words, the public houses will be gradually converted into decent centres of social recreation and refreshment. Those who have followed the working of the Carlisle system will appreciate how successful this movement has been in diminishing drunkenness and in improving the happiness and well-being of the neighbourhood. Why there should be one moment's hesitation in offering similar blessings to other neighbourhoods is a question which we cannot too insistently prow upon the conscience of England."
What Lord Meston " aims at " is precisely what I also want. I heartily agree with every word he writ about the character of the public houses we ought t have and about the enthusiasm with which people ough to work for them. Our only difference is as to ti road by which we can travel to this end. He hello- in the road of Local Option and disinterested manage ment or " reorganization," as the Bishop of Liverpool' Bill calls it. I have already given my reasons fo rejecting Local Option as a device that results in praeti ally nothing happening, and I will now come to disin terested management, which, as a matter of fact, if were wanted, could be introduced without Local Option Temperance reformers live in a strangely unrea world. I wish this were not so, as I continually fin' myself desiring, but failing, to agree with them. T first unreality I note in the argument about disinterestt management is the allegation that the sale of (Ira' is " pushed " or " pressed " in public houses. The cannot know very much about the ordinary 01 house. Naturally the owners of public houses, a those managers who receive commissions on the sa of drink, want to make as much money as possible That is true of every trade. But the injury done t' a public house by excessive drinking is so great Os no conceivable incentive could induce a publican w knows his business to encourage it. If drunken pose are seen coming out of the house, or even if the hou acquires a reputation for being noisy, complaints a made. The police become watchful. Reports arc Ia before the Licensing Justices. The house may lose I licence. The publican is in constant terror of this.
The 'phrase " pushing drink " suggests that 'a barmy or • barmaid continually urges visitors to drink more, )e the publican is almost the only salesman I know 11 seems to be quite indifferent about the amount customers buy. The barmaid—for it is genendly. barmaid—stands there looking detached. or bored. a trace of gratification lights her face if the orders I drink come thick and fast. The only thing that plea her is a little conversation to while away the tiring a. tedious hours. There is no equivalent in public houg of the suave pressure by men- and women who sell shops, no counterpart of " what is the next thing please? ". I once talked to a publican about this familiar accusation 01' pushing drink, . and he laughed tolerantly as though he meant, " Well, of course, that's what they would say l " Then he went on to explain that he detested the very sight of a man who usually drank too much. " I have to watch him all the time or I may get into trouble.. He's an absolute nuisance. If. I refuse him more drink. I get into trouble with him and if I let him have it I get into trouble outside. Besides, he isn't even a good customer from the point of view of business. He soon spends his money. Or he loses his job and doesn't come for weeks. The man I like is the moderate, regular. man."
This expression of opinion convinced me so far as it went. It rang true. But I do not pretend that it exhausts the matter. Publicans may have indirect ways, which I ave not detected, of pressing drink, and in any case I link it is most undesirable that anyone who conducts a public house should receive direct commission on the sales of drink. In some of the latest public houses run by reputable firms of brewers, and also in the Trust Com- pany's houses, commissions are given on food but not on drink. I should like to see that practice made universal. here seems to.be no reason why-it should not be enforced w law. Moreover, a manager should never be repriinan- ded, but rather should be praised, if a reduction in his drink sales is offset by an increase in his food sales.
Even if the nationalization of the drink trade is desirable n the abstract, the opportunity for introducing it passed vith the War. During the War there was a great shortage of transport and then would have been the time for the Government to say : " We do not want to abolish drink now that everyone is working his hardest, but we must ave complete control of the whole apparatus, so that there shall be no danger of personal demoralization, and so that we can withdraw whatever transport is urgently anted." If that had been proposed I should have been n favour of it. If it had been done the drink trade might ave remained in the hands of the State.
But it was not done, and not many reformers would link it worth while now to spend their breath on asking the Chancellor of the Exchequer to add to his other worries the speculative business of owning the nation's drink. That, let me say again, is really why most of the cham- pions of nationalization have fallen in behind the Bishop of Liverpool's Bill. They recognize that there is nothing for it but to get nationalization by degrees. But by what terribly slow degrees ! Probably fifty years hence there would be little change from the present situation. If I were a nationalizer I should be appalled. Mr. Grcville used to say, " Nothing will be done because in this country nothing ever is." But fancy adding to our native slowness a special apparatus for stereotyping slowness !
It is said that even if the State proved to be a bad manager of the drink trade, that would not matter but would actually be in a sense an advantage, as the less successful the State was in selling drink the better. Thus there are drink nationalizers who would not consent to the nationalization of any other trade whatever. This argument might be a consolation if the State had bought out the trade in the War and were now losing on it ; but it is not likely to make the smallest impression on a Chancellor of the Exchequer in our present financial distresses. No ; we must look for other means of reform, and especially of speedy reform.
Finally I must refer to, though I cannot discuss it in this article, the gigantic assumption—it is nothing less— that the State would be free of any " incentive " to push drink. No doubt its managers would be faultless. They would not urge people to drink. They could very easily be brought to book if they did. But imagine a Govern- ment with a General Election in hand and a considerable agitation going on in some " doubtful " industrial district for a reduction in the price of beer. Pressure on the seller may be just as strong as pressure on the buyer. I must reserve this extraordinary assumption for discussion in another article, but I would just ask at the end of this one whether anyone can tell me of a person or an institution in the whole world (except perhaps a weak father of daugh- ters) who is more liable to be " squeezed " than a Coven t- ment which is in sore need of votes ? A.
(To be continued.)
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