Outside the bubble: “Pubs don’t deserve special treatment”

It’s a given, isn’t it, that pubs are a good thing and deserve protection? Well, it turns out that many people disagree. At the weekend the UK Government announced new planning rules that make it harder to turn pubs into homes or offices. To push ahead with this kind of conversion, developers will now need to show that the pub could not be kept running. And it will no longer need to be the last pub in the area to come under this protective umbrella, either. As people who believe that pubs deserve extra protection, and extra support, because of their cultural and social importance, we thought this announcement constituted a rare bit of good news. It was startling, then, to see various people on non-beer social media railing against this policy for reasons like… it’s for Reform voters; pubs are “Brexit coded” it’s nonsense that people talk to strangers in the pub it’s just encouraging drinking, a social ill we need homes more than pubs; this is NIMBYism We won’t link to specific posts –…