June 6, 2008
Booze and really sloppy crime seem to go hand-in-hand. We’ve documented this heavily in “The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death (and other true tales of drunken debauchery”, particularly in the section “Crime Doesn’t Pay Your Bar Tab”, and we’re presented with constant reminders of the truth of it on a regular basis. Drunk criminals, it must be said, do offer society the bonus of being easy to catch, both because they’re quick to lose their wind when chased and also because they – like the drunk in our book who left a trail of red paint running from the bank he had just robbed to the pub where he was drinking up his haul – are just really not the most formidable criminal masterminds of our times.
If you’re a proprietor of a bar, the sheer volume of drunks you have to deal with pretty much guarantees that you will come into contact with at least one arsehole a day, and if you’re really unlucky, said arsehole will have a similar outlook in like to that of Irvine Welsh’s hellish creation Franco Begbie, the violent psychopath who separated people from their teeth in both “Trainspotting” and its sequel “Porno” (he also has a walk-on role in the excellent “Glue”).
According to a report in the North Wales Daily Post, it seems that pubs in North Wales might be on to something when it comes to keeping those in this latter school out of their bars. A group of publicans from 40 establishments throughout North Wales have banded together to form PubWatch. The strength of the group is in the uniform approach it takes to banning troubled customers. Get blacklisted by PubWatch and you’re out of luck at any of the bars under its preview. For your sociable drunken psychopath this is death.
The scheme has been successful, in fact from an outsider’s perspective it would seem to be embarrassingly successful as a North Wales police inspector recently went on the record as saying that the threat of a Pubwatch ban actually carries more weight than the possibility of having to face a day in court. “When they are arrested and we tell them they are off to court they shrug their shoulders, but tell them they are banned from the pubs and they start to plead with you,” he is quoted as saying in the North Wales Daily Post. Either some pretty lenient sentences are being doled out in Wales or the criminals there have a love of drinking that is more powerful than the fear of a jail-shanking.
Pub Watch systems, which are in place elsewhere in the UK, do have their detractors. A group of boozing enthusiasts in Scunthorpe have lodged a human-rights complaint against their local version of PubWatch after they received a ban from all area bars. Said one: “I well understand the ban in the pub where I was out of order - but not in 29 others where I have never done anything wrong.” And he has a point. Letting a heavy ashtray fly at the head of an adversary in the midst of a spirited conversation is not exemplary behavior, but shouldn’t result in you being banned from every pub if it was just an isolated incident. (But if it happens at say 12 pubs, then we can see why the local publicans might want to build a human wall to keep you off their premises).
And there is no doubt that publicans will be able to use the ban even when maintaining law and order is not the key issue, like the recent ban on Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling. We’ve never had a drink with the chancellor and cannot guess at his swings of temperament when under the influence, but it would appear that the ban has more to do with recent tax increases that he’s implemented which directly pinch publicans.
