Good morning from behind the bar, where the beer is still pouring – just. So far this year I have been involved in the sad, and probably permanent, closure of three family-owned pubs. The choice was stark in each case: bankruptcy or fold up. Three families almost ruined, three perfectly good business that employed over a dozen staff and three villages that had already lost their churches, their post offices and – the final nail in the coffin – their pubs.

I watched Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson, pint in hand, holding a live-streamed conference from behind a pub bar on Wednesday. Reform UK had decorated the beer taps on the bar top with satirical puns on the names of popular beverages: ‘Taxers’, ‘Doomed Bar’, ‘Mad Rates’ – things that I and every other publican in the UK have been forced to drink more of since Labour came to power. There has been no great call from the government for moderation on those particular poisons.

Farage unveiled a five-point plan to save the great British pub. Tax cuts form the core of the plan, with a 10 per cent reduction in beer duty (from around 49p per pint), halving VAT on hospitality to 10 per cent, and exempting the sector from the employer National Insurance (NI) rise. Duty increases have hurt: Reeves’s 3.66 per cent hike in the autumn Budget added 38p to a bottle of gin, prompting my own 20p price rises last week.

We are losing our ability to argue and socialise

A duty cut could trim 5p from a pint if it was........

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