What’s So Bad About CAMRA?
I’ve taken a few pot-shots at CAMRA throughout this work so the question is a reasonable one; what is so bad about CAMRA?
To be fair, I don’t particularly rail against CAMRA but I do take issue with some of the fights they have picked over the years and I am particularly disgusted with their claim to have ‘smashed the big brewers’ stranglehold on UK pubs’ in the wake of the Beer Orders.
For me, the Beer Orders marked the demise of one of our great traditional industries and opened the door for foreign companies to brew much of the beer consumed in our pubs today.
I look at the history of a company like Bass, a company founded in 1777, and it breaks my heart that they are no longer with us. Particularly given that they were legislated out of existence and their assets picked over by foreign brewers and soulless pubcos.
Companies come and go, of course they do, but to see our brewers hounded out of business by a Conservative government and to then have to watch CAMRA gleefully dancing on their graves is not something I can witness without comment.
They also claimed to have freed 11,000 pubs from ties to brewers via the same mechanism. Of course, that was true in a literal sense but it also delivered them into the hands of pubcos and I really can’t see that as a good thing.
I realise I’m in a minority, quite possibly a minority of one, but I see the role that CAMRA played in the wrecking of our brewing industry as a stain on their history and yet they seem proud of it.
The Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale, to become the more familiar Campaign for Real Ale that we know now, was the brainchild of four men: Michael Hardman, Graham Lees, Jim Makin and Bill Mellor.
At the time, 1971, there was a feeling that the national brewers were pushing their pasteurised products at the expense of the live product that we call ‘real’ ale and the founding members of CAMRA wanted to push back. That seems perfectly reasonable to me and as a real ale fan it’s a notion I can get on board with completely.
CAMRA now boasts a membership of over 170,000 so they are a serious outfit for sure and are definitely striking a chord for plenty of people.
Their victories over the years, if they are to be believed, are significant and should be applauded.
Reading the CAMRA website there is a claim of a ‘win’ in the campaign for pubco reform. It was undoubtedly a win, but CAMRA make no mention of the other bodies campaigning for the same end and led by the British Pub Confederation, a body whose members included the Fair Pint Campaign, Licensees Supporting Licensees, Justice for Licensees, the Parliamentary Save the Pub Group, the Punch Tenant Network, the Pubs Advisory Service, and the Guild of Licensed Master Victuallers.
It also discounts the efforts of other industry bodies such as SIBA (the Society of Independent Brewers) and ALMR (Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers) and very much discounts the, somewhat heroic, efforts of pub champion MP Greg Mulholland.
There is a similar claim for the ‘win’ for the campaigns on duty for both beer and cider, neither of which mention the other trade bodies involved and both leaving the reader with the impression that CAMRA went into bat singlehandedly and emerged with a significant victory on behalf of the little guy.
New Campaigns
Having won the battle against the brewers, CAMRA appears to be turning its attention elsewhere. In fact, they don’t appear to know quite where to turn their attention and in early 2016 they embarked on a ‘revitalisation project’, polling their members in order to find out what they should do next.
One of their founding members, Michael Hardman, returned to the organisation in order to head up the project and gave a very entertaining (described as a ‘car crash’ by one Twitter commentator) interview on Radio 4 which I was fortunate enough to catch.
In the interview Michael Hardman specifically mentioned pubs themselves as a possible point of focus for them and I pricked my ears up at that. There had been a recent case of CAMRA members successfully applying for a pub to be registered as an ‘Asset of Community Value’ or ACV.
An ACV is a property (or land) that is considered to be important to the community and subjects that property to some protection from development. In the case of pubs they can be applied for by the community to prevent the pub being sold and turned into supermarkets or nursing homes.
The owner of the pub in question, the Leather Bottle in Colchester, had no intention of selling the pub and was hopping mad that ‘do gooders’ could interfere in his business. He also told his local paper in an interview that all CAMRA members were now barred from his pub.
Whilst an ACV doesn’t prevent the pub, any pub, being sold as a going concern it does place restrictions on what might well be a person’s single biggest asset and they do put an extra layer of bureaucracy in the way of somebody who may want to realise the best possible value from their asset.
It’s not hard, for me at least, to see what the pub owner was mad about.
In the end, that’s what really peeves me about CAMRA. They may well pat each other on the back and congratulate themselves on a job well done by saving an asset for the community but there is a flip side to that and they fail to acknowledge it.
That pub belongs to an individual and that individual could quite possibly have put his balls on the line to buy it and poured heart and soul into making it work. A campaign group who may or may not have members living in the community, and who may never have set foot in his pub, have taken it upon themselves to save his pub for the greater good; whether it needed saving or not.
It’s the same story with the Beer Orders. They crow about ‘smashing the Big Six’ but there is no acknowledgement of the decimation of the British brewing industry off the back of the same legislation or the creation of the pubcos that filled the vacuum left by the brewers.
There is a deep irony in there; pubcos came about in the wake of the Beer Orders which CAMRA championed and now CAMRA campaigns vociferously against pubcos and their ‘huge excess profits’ – whatever that means (Punch Taverns’ ‘excess profit’ was -£240m in 2014 and -£105m in 2015).
CAMRA, quite rightly, celebrates cask ale and is currently very supportive of the micropub explosion sweeping the country. Their periodical magazines have plenty of features on micropubs and microbrewers.
The fact that so many of the small operators are able to thrive and bring new products to market is due in no small part to the Small Brewers' Relief Scheme. A scheme which was the culmination of some 20 years of tireless campaigning by SIBA, the Society of Independent Brewers. CAMRA are not the only game in town.
When CAMRA first evolved they had some real purpose, they wanted to save cask ale as they believed that brewers were trying to phase it out. I can admire that at least; a genuinely clear vision and purity of purpose.
In 2016 CAMRA seems far less clear in its vision of itself and where it is heading, in fact they put out a press release titled ‘Is this the end of the Campaign For Real Ale’ and it’s an interesting question for sure. The fight to save real ale, if there ever was a fight, is won; we have something in the order of 1,500 brewers in this country now and the craft sector is in rude good health.
That being the case, the question is ‘what is CAMRA for now?’ and they don’t entirely have an answer. What worries me about CAMRA more than anything else is that they look like a campaigning body looking for a cause and that, to me, is a very dangerous animal.
For me, CAMRA should be able to survive without a cause to fight. Why can they not become a consumer body that celebrates the product that has been at the heart of their cause? They have a great membership with knowledgeable and passionate people happily paying their annual fee in order to be part of something they clearly enjoy.
CAMRA has a platform; they could be a voice for good. There is so much to be positive about in our industry and particularly in the craft beer sector. Maybe CAMRA could wake up to that and stop looking around for a fight to pick in order to justify their existence?
