Wetherspoon News, a sort of in-flight magazine for a “flight” which consists of drinking cheap pints on your own while going absolutely nowhere at all, has long been an entertainingly idiosyncratic mix of light features of about award-winning toilets and angry polemic from the pub chain’s founder Tim Martin about VAT (ideally not having to pay it) or government advice on healthy levels of alcohol consumption (ideally not having to listen to it).
2016 was a pretty big year for the publication, available free in the company’s pubs. Not only did it celebrate its 25th anniversary, but it was of course the year of the EU referendum – something Martin has rather strong views about.
Not only were 200,000 Vote Leave beer mats ordered, but the summer edition of Wetherspoons News dedicated 15 pages to various shades of Brexit comment, including six pages of reprinted Daily Mail columns by everyone’s favourite Brexiteer MEP Daniel Hannan (“Dan the man”, comes Martin’s glowing word of approval). Plus a piece by Tony Benn, which is impressive given that he’d been dead for two years.
The Brexit issue
Martin presented his own arguments at length, which as well as the usual huffing about the supposedly undemocratic nature of the EU also include Wetherspoons not buying much European wine these days anyway, and the apparently negligible risk of France or Germany invading the UK upon the triggering of Article 50, which he appeared to believe was a serious concern of the Remain campaign.
As if the result of the referendum didn’t make the Wetherspoon News zeitgeisty enough, the latest edition contains a splendidly deranged rant by a pub landlord trainer Paul Chase, who’s heard of something called virtue signalling and is not prepared to let only vaguely understanding what it is prevent him from writing a few hundred words about why it is part of an evil plot to stop the honest British citizen from getting pissed up.
Paul Chase’s op-ed
Virtue signalling is, in fairness, a bit of a nebulous concept, largely used by the deeply unpleasant in an attempt to discredit anyone doing anything nice ever: “I cannot imagine doing anything that isn’t self-serving, so therefore I cannot imagine anyone else doing it either.”
Here it is presented as a fashion statement: the UK’s Chief Medical Officer lowering recommended alcohol intake limits is compared to the trend of wearing a baseball cap. One signals being down with the apparently “pro-virtue” establishment, the other signals being down with saying “cowabunga”. Perhaps this starts to make more sense if you consume all 14 of your weekly allowed units in one go.
The latest copy of Wetherspoon News
It’s hard to determine what the readers – two million, according to the cover – of Wetherspoon News make of all this – the letters pages are full of glowing stuff along the lines of “Dear sir, I, my wife and our three large boys eat at Wetherspoons every day because it is so nice. Have you considered raising the prices because we would gladly pay double!”, presumably because you get 20 quid in beer tokens if they like your letter enough to print it.
But as big Tim points out in response to a rare negative letter begging him to stop banging on about Brexit: “Debate is the key to freedom and part of the democratic process.” Perhaps Wetherspoon News is the true heart of British democracy in 2017 after all. Hopefully Wetherspoons drinkers can look forward to reading someone from the beer trade’s hot take about fake news and alternative facts in the spring issue.
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