Dear Mike Harding (and friends) Keith Sutcliffe pointed me to your post... Absolutely Spot On! 

From early next year publicans are going to be taking our pubs back from accountants and running them for the people they were always meant to serve: YOU!

The People's Pub Partnership, the Ethical Pub Company, is going to be crowd funded from Spring 2014.

People have stopped going to pubs because pubs have become horrible places to go to - as Mike says above either carbon copy blandness or run into the ground and stinky from decades of being asset stripped by the same companies who make their other pubs bland and rubbish.

Pubs, broadly, are:

Either owned by pub companies and leased to individual publicans who have their profits stolen from them through excessive rent and beer prices set by the accountants who run the pubco; the profits are used to throw into interest instalments on the gargantuan loans they raised to buy the pubs in the first place. These zombie companies keep going to pay the accountants £millions of take home and bonuses - awarded for ruining, closing, then flogging off their pubs to Tesco and Paddy Power or be converted to speculative housing developments that blight our landscape for generations while robbing the people who used the pubs of vital social hubs and the focus of many communities...

Or owned by pub companies who directly run them under the eye of accountants who compete against their rivals to make sure it's impossible for customers to distinguish one pub from another - from Land's End to John O'Groats thses pubs are all the same - their 'brands' are boring shiny soulless identikit carbon copies rolled off mood boards drawn on computers by designers who'll never set foot in the pubs they imagine other people like. They sell dull food from menus that are the same all over the country which is served by bored staff to a script to customers looking good value and quality and struggle to find it in the run down knackered tied pubs as above...

If you love pubs none of this makes sense at all. But if you're a bean counting wine loving accountant who's passion is for anodyne 'unbranded brand concepts' that rake it in, like this: http://www.scotsman.com/.../m-b-cheers-city-as-consumers...

The People's Pub Partnership will be launching in Spring 2014. We're going to take pubs back from the accountants and put publicans in the driving seat to run pubs for people!

Pubs for All; All for Pubs!

We're going to raise £millions in small amounts from thousands of people and change the face of the British pub sector for good? If you'd like to help cure the rot in the UK pub sector please go to our holding website and sign up to our mailing list - or to the facebook page and ask one of us to get in touch with you and we'll tell you more... You will be able to put in as little as £100 in £20 instalments or as much as £200K in one go. Everyone will be treated the same and all the money will go to buy bricks and mortar and turn trashed pubs into treasures!

The People's Pub Partnership; Run by publicans who know what they are doing for people who know what they want! The Ethical Pub Company, putting pubs at the heart of the community and the accountants back in the office where they belong!

website: http://www.peoplespubpartnership.org/

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ThePeoplesPubPartnership

twitter: https://twitter.com/PeoplesPubPtshp