In yet another blow to the hospitality industry, the Government has announced that all customers at pubs, restaurants and cafes must provide contact details (either written or via the NHS Test and Trace app) on entry. Previously, only one member of each group had to provide details. Doing so was voluntary (staff were only asked to “encourage” customers to provide their details). But the new guidelines state that those who will not provide their details must be “refuse[d] entry”. BBC News has the story.
New rules to help pubs, cafes and restaurants reopen outdoors safely in England on April 12th have sparked anger from industry groups.
All customers will have to sign in on entry, not just one member of the group like before. It is also unclear whether payment at the bar will be permitted. …
Under the new guidance, every customer aged 16 and over will have to check in to NHS Test and Trace before entering a venue, or give their contact details to staff.
Pubs and restaurants must take “reasonable steps” to stop people who won’t comply from coming in, or they could face fines.
Carl Ford, an accountant based in Tamworth, told the BBC he was frustrated and confused by the rules.
“I feel like it’s almost like going back to school where I have to sign in and out,” he said.
“I don’t understand why I have to do this in a restaurant or pub, but I don’t need to do this in a supermarket where you have a free for all. People don’t have to sign in and they can pick up fruit with their hands.” …
In a joint statement, UK Hospitality, the British Beer & Pub Association and the British Institute of Innkeeping said the rules would add “more confusion and inconvenience for customers and staff”.
When pubs and restaurants opened last summer, customers were “encouraged” to provide their contact details, but to do so was not mandatory (see official guidance below).
These guidelines have, however, since been updated: venues must now take “reasonable steps to refuse entry to those who refuse to check in or provide contact details”. Compliance is no longer a personal choice. It is mandatory.
Venues which do not force their customers to provide details will themselves face “financial penalties“.
After having been shut for almost a whole year, how are pubs and restaurants expected to survive if potential customers decide that – because of the new overbearing rules – it is easier and more enjoyable to drink with friends in their back gardens?
The BBC News report is worth reading in full.
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I was a little disparaging of Joanna’s last piece in DS, but this has far greater merit. I recognise myself and all my dangerous far right friends in these words. How to get this across succinctly though.?
Live and let live?
Sadly though the whole philosophy espoused in this article is now simply history. There is nothing I do not recognise but it is a longing for that which will never return. I fear that the next few years will brutalise our country and its British people. To imagine that our future is not dystopian is to close eyes to the wreckage that has been wrought and the wreckage that is to come under this WEF Labour government.
“You will own nothing and be happy.”
That is the future.
” is now simply history. ”
I know what you are saying but her words very much describe my life and where I live. I know I am lucky and privileged but the world she describes does still exist, here down the deep lanes of North Devon as depicted in the wonderful photographs of Jame Revilious. I will be out on Wednesday night at the village emergency committee, checking the list of the village’s emergency chainsaw operators. It may not last for ever and it may be under threat but at the moment it does still exist.
I’m with you on this SD and a good article yes – open gardens in our ‘village’ (fast growing into small town – thankyou central government planning overrule) bought people out in droves and umbrella’s yesterday to nosey around and call in and view the little garden my friend (82 + old frail & widowed) has made – a perfect small south facing garden, tamed by her knowledge and interest. And fortified by my rather fine (I say so myself) chocolate checkerboard cake. She and I both agree we are lucky to have the space to enjoy and the interest and the company to keep us both going. For as long as we can.
It’s the same where I live in the west country and it’s why I moved here 8 years ago.
But it’s changing fast: already a small town which was 98% white has visibly growing numbers of “ethnic minorities” who I very much doubt were able to afford to buy a property here, so they will be occupying social housing. I am not making a comment about them as individuals, they may all be perfectly lovely people, but the fact is the area is visibly changing … very quickly.
“And the creed and the colour and the name won’t matter” …. except as we see around the country and particularly in some areas the creed does matter … and it matters a great deal.
Ditto in rural Oxfordshire
Enjoy it while it lasts. Where I live was pretty much the same till bout 5 years ago. Now new packets of migrants get opened every week.
It isn’t 1955 anymore. The Vicar doesn’t cycle down the lane and my grandmother does not get her mangle out from the Anderson Shelter. There was no such thing as “diversity”. You got no money unless you worked, which is why my grandad spent 50 years down the Michael Pit. We didn’t eat micro wave junk and fill our belly with Cheesy Wotsits and Irn Bru. Young girls didn’t push their babies along in a pram and ignore them completely because they are fiddling all the time with their silly phone. ——-But then again people will say I have to move with the times. —-WHY?
Varmint yr family are very lucky to have you.
Why thankyou . I am very humbled.——–If you mean it
Agree.
I have never believed in change for changes sake.
The red thumbs down people are big Cheesy Wotsit fans obviously
How about this – conservatives care about people as individuals, the left just cares about the system.
They just care about power.
and votes
It’s an absolutely superb article. I may have been disparaging about her last piece too. I think what she’s saying here is the left (Tory, labour communist green lib dem) essentially has a complete god complex. Who here doesn’t think David Cameron would rather see Dianne Abbot as pm rather than Nigel Farage?
This!
Thomas Sowell puts it very well.
The policy arguments between liberals and conservatives, socialists and libertarians, do not arise just from differences in priorities regarding freedom, equality, and security. At root, they draw from different conceptions of the nature of man. The Left holds an unconstrained vision: Given the right political and economic arrangements, human beings can be improved, even perfected. Success is defined by what people have the potential of becoming, not by people as they are. The Right holds a constrained vision: People come to society with innate characteristics that cannot be reshaped and must instead be accommodated. Success in political and economic policy must be defined in light of those innate characteristics.
I recognise elements of this in the place I live – a county town in a fairly rural area, traditionally Tory. We now have a Labour MP. I think the problem is that a lot of the people involved in the kind of thing described in the article are simply too “nice” or too asleep.
Very well put, Joanna. I enjoyed this article a lot. I nodded a lot, too. Thank you.
Bang on… with the exception of enjoying Love Island! Nice, uplifting piece.
I do hate any article that makes a claim of something being better without saying what it is compared with.
It is as bad as claiming that change is a virtue when it is Labour change, whereas climate change is bad.
I take it from the article that we have not had a Conservative government for years, and probably decades.
PS I don’t have a deep memory of Lord Salisbury, I am not quite that old and anyway I don’t mix in those circles.
Not to mention warm beer and old maids cycling through the mist to church.
Give me a break. There is a horrible kind of demanded conformity in the vision outlined here. A kind of socialism, if you like, or subordination of the individual to the collective.
Thanks, Joanna, for reminding me that I am not, and never will be again, a Conservative. Let’s hear it for William Gladstone and not be seduced by the siren song of Disraeli.
Well, I don’t know if I am a conservative or not. Any society will have some element of “demanded conformity” won’t it? Don’t the problems start when the “demand” is with menaces – you must voice the right opinions otherwise you will lose your job, you must take this injection, you must give the state all your money?
That’s a nice village that you live in, Joanna!
You have nailed it Joanna
Sovereignty of the individual, self-responsibility, self-respect, self-discipline, self-sufficiency, property Rights, celebration of heritage, our common language, morals, values, manners, traditions and Common Law, free market capitalism/free trade.
Conservatism is adopt and conserve what gives best outcome – but experiment, evaluate, evolve – not obsession with process irrespective of outcomes.
Welfare State, NHS, State education, redistribution of wealth via taxation, State intervention in the economy, social engineering, telling us what we may/may not put into our bodies, State determination of values, morals, is not Conservatism. But that describes many ‘Conservatives’ and every ‘Conservative’ Government since the war.
Love it! Thank you Joanna.
Ah, what a lovely vision of Olde Englande, suddenly brought crashing down by… “LOVE ISLAND”????
She claims that “We Conservatives” all enjoy DISGUSTING PORNOGRAPHY and VOYEURISM????
Speak for yourself, Joanna.
And where in your Item 2 is the village pub and post office?