I think you’re thinking of Philip Green who owns arcadia (topshop) and storehouse(BHS).

>>lots of shops with different names but the same company behind ‘em?
Kingfisher? Or is that me showing my age.

It might be a collection of franchises like Debenhams rather than the Wal-mart model, but ultimately it’s the same idea.

Is there a high street analogy for lots of shops with different names but the same company behind ‘em? Glasgow’s drinking/club scene seems to be in the hands of about three people…

>>Violent people are violent, drunk or sober
Last round of this media hysteria (headed by Helen Liddel if my memory serves), the Record had the classic headline “Buckfast turned my son from a nutter to a killer”

There is no reason that the councils, police, taxi companies and the pub owners couldn’t get together and sort this out. Staggered closing times is a possibility. A curfew on all pubs that they can have no new entries after midnight (to stop everyone leaving one pub for another), for example, and each pub stops serving in 15 minute intervals and at different ends of an area (not the same order every night to stop any particular pub being busier due to later opening). A couple of big taxi ranks and a relatively high police presence with CCTV. Numbers would be manageable in the most part if the taxis were organised. With CCTV and the police then prosecuting violent individuals would be easier. Radio-link the bouncers so that if someone is chibbed out of one pub they don’t get into another. And so on.

Oh, I know. But to an extent the councils have created the situation through the combination of planning and licensing and local taxation. The combination of sky-high rent/rates and planning/licensing that approves multiple, massive-capacity pubs in the same small area isn’t going to create anything but industrialised alcohol abuse and its knock-on wonderfulness. If that lack of joined up thinking causes the problem, could joined up thinking help address it?

I’m not suggesting council-mandated decorating, but surely you can look at an application, compare square footage to capacity, and realise it’s a booze factory rather than a pub?

The only reason they are all like that is because every one of them are packed every weekend.

True, but at the expense of ordinary (and particularly local) pubs – everyone’s travelling into the city to get trashed. The super-pubs are moving the boozing into one big area with inadequate control, inadequate policing, the same chucking-out times and a lack of transport to get everyone home again. Of course people will get pissed at the weekend – but do we want everybody from a 20-mile radius to get pissed in the same two or three streets?

A good example of what I mean is Ashton Lane in the west end of glasgow. A recent spate of late licenses and the opening of Oran Mor (and in particular its club) have massively increased the number of people drinking in a fairly small area. Now those late licences and openings haven’t suddenly created people who didn’t previously exist, or got tee-totallers drinking, but presumably they did their drinking somewhere else. So the new capacity has relocated the boozing from elsewhere and concentrated it in one place – with all the potential problems that can cause, such as me not being able to get served. Heh.

Do you see what I’m getting at? It’s a kind of Wal-Mart but with drinking instead of shopping.

The idea that the French don’t drink to excess is a popular myth. In fact, they have an endemic drunk-driving problem which successive governments have been getting more and more draconian to try and break. Plenty of alcoholism, too.

And, like I said, the “problem” with pubs seems to be that there are different types of pub for different people: there are loads of quiet civilised places where you can sit and chat and eat and no-one looks at you funny if you order a pot of tea and the DJ’s under strict orders to play at background volumes. So neither the licensing system nor market forces are stopping these places popping up and thriving. So changing the licensing requirements merely to encourage such places is pointless: they’re already encouraged. So we’d be looking instead at changing the licensing system to ban the noisy standing-room-only kind of pub outright. Lots of people want to listen to ear-blistering pop music while getting trashed. I can’t see that banning the pubs where they can do that will stop them.