Jonathan Downey is a former corporate lawyer turned restaurateur and bar owner who is regarded as one of the most influential people in the hospitality industry in the capital.
Jonathan has gone on to open 20 venues across the world, and is one of the minds behind the renowned Street Feast food market in East London.
Since the government issued a 10pm curfew on bars and pubs across England, however, he has been forced to close the doors of his famous Milk and Honey London in Soho, one of the best-loved bars in the area after 18 years of business.
He has been an advocate for keeping pubs and restaurants alive in London, as it was estimated that back in May more than 30,000 pubs and restaurants may remain permanently closed because of lockdown.
Jonathan has also lobbied for a pause to rent payments to mitigate the losses caused due to this pandemic.
Watch as we sit down with Jonathan Downey to discuss the curfew, rent and landlords, mass closures, the economy, and what’s next for the hospitality industry in London.
0:42 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jonathan Downey, the former corporate lawyer turned restaurateur and bar owner who is regarded as one of the most influential people in the hospitality industry with 20 venues across the world. Throughout the pandemic, you have campaigned tirelessly for more government help to keep pubs and restaurants alive and have lobbied for a pause in rent payments to mitigate the losses incurred from the lockdown.
1:20 You have routinely highlighted the need to focus on data and pointed out that less than 5% of transmissions are taking place within hospitality venues. Unfortunately, the recently announced 10pm curfew has seen you forced to close the doors for good on your bar Milk & Honey in Soho after 18 years of business. Jonathan, welcome to London Real. Thank you very much. Great having you here. I was a member of Milk & Honey back in the day, and it was an iconic space in Soho, and it’s really sad to hear this happening.
1:51 I’ve been looking into the numbers lately and trying to get some people to pay attention, but I had no idea the hospitality industry is so big. Four and a half million people employed, 15% of the workforce, $140 billion of revenue. And now this lockdown, tell me what’s been going through your mind the last few months and even the last week or so. God, what a six month period it’s been. It’s been the strangest period of my life. It’s been the most difficult period of my business life.
2:20 I mean, I’ve been through cash flow crunches. I’ve been through recessions. I’ve been through a $2 million hole in my accounts. I’ve been through bank fraud of an Australian business partner. I’ve been through near bankruptcy because of personal guarantees, but I’ve never been through anything as difficult as lockdown.
2:38 And then for that to be followed by this ridiculous 10 p.m. curfew is kind of like the final nail in the coffin for me. And, you know, I’d probably rock and roll with it. I’d be quite sanguine about it if I could understood the evidence and the reasoning behind some of these moves, but I just don’t. And, you know, we’re six months in now. We know a lot more about this virus. We know who’s at risk. We know who’s vulnerable.
3:01 And we need to stop making these guesses and estimates about what may or may not happen. And even in the last two weeks, we’ve seen the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser on national television showing us graphs about exponential increase in infections, et cetera. And this is what could happen. And there could be another 50,000 deaths, blah, blah. And it’s just nonsense.
3:26 And I feel like we’re being, you know, we’re not being led. There is no real leadership. And I feel now in the last two weeks, we are being lied to like we’ve never been lied to before. And I don’t understand what is behind that approach, what is behind these lies. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
3:45 You know, this government should be the party of business and free enterprise and, you know, and freedom of expression and association, et cetera. And then they’ve been the exact opposite. And I don’t know what’s driving it. I wish I did. Yeah, it’s frustrating. I see those same things, a lack of leadership, a completely disproportionate response to the virus and then a total lack of science based decision making.
4:08 They talk about the cases. OK, it’s 5000 and 7000 cases. But when I drilled into the numbers, you know, it was like 266 hospital admissions, 13 deaths that were covid related. But that means you tested positive for the test in 28 days. The number of smoking related deaths on the same day was 10, 15 times as much.
4:28 And yet they’re not locking down the tobacco stores. So like you said, it doesn’t make sense. It’s like the evidence is right in front of our government. And yet they’re making these incorrect decisions. It’s frustrating.
4:40 It really is. I mean, you know, I don’t want to really get into too much. I’m not really an expert, but, you know, we need to get some perspective. I posted a couple of things recently online that, you know, we are fighting, we are dealing with a virus, we are not fighting an alien army, you know, we are dealing with a virus. This is not an extinction event. The Death Star is not entering Earth orbit. We’ve just got to get some perspective.
5:05 I understand that on average in the U.K., there are 450 cancer deaths every single day on average. I was reading the press two days ago that a million women have missed cancer screenings because of COVID. You know, what the fuck is going on? I mean, how more obvious that these are facts. This is established data about cancer risk and cancer deaths. Why aren’t we treating that as as importantly as significantly as we do COVID?
5:35 This government has put billions, tens of billions of pounds of taxpayer cash into propping up businesses like mine and the economy generally. And what are we doing about everything else? You know, what are we doing about everything else? This is kind of the greatest example of economic health, self-harm this country has ever experienced. You know, people have different views on Brexit and for many that’s an example of economic self-harm.
6:01 Who knows how that will turn out? We do know now that our economy is tanking. I think GDP, I think for April and May was down almost 20% in this country. I understand the hospitality in my industry, the collapse of my industry is responsible for a third of that drop. We are a significant industry. It’s why we’ve been given so much support.
6:27 But we’ve been, you know, after all that support, after eat out to help out, okay, which I understood cost about $450 million of taxpayer cash. After eat out to help out, they’re now bringing this curfew which has just cut the legs from under us and has led directly to the closure of milk and honey, as you mentioned. That business has been there for 18 years. We’ve been one of the most successful bars in the world. It’s the world’s best bar for four years. You know, it’s highly regarded. It’s well-respected. It’s successful.
6:56 And after 18 years and so, we’ve had to close simply because of the curfew. It’s a direct sole reason is this curfew. And, you know, they may cancel it. They have to cancel this curfew. There’s no evidence that it should be there. And I don’t understand it.
7:09 You know, let’s see. Let’s see. Well, let’s talk about the curfew because, you know, you had shut down in March and then you had started opening up with a smaller staff. But you had started to get it working again, getting some cash flow. And like you said, it’s one of the safest places you can be.
7:24 I mean, these places are designed to be sanitized and, you know, safe enough to serve food. And then the 10 p.m. curfew hit. And I read a figure that revenues were down 60 percent in hospitality on the back of a 10 p.m. curfew.
7:39 Explain why that what seems like an arbitrary decision hurts your businesses so much. Well, I think a lot of people have just said, well, it’s only an extra hour that you’re losing. And it’s not that, you know, milk and honey generally trades from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m. But post lockdown, we’ve been trading from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m.
7:58 You know, the nighttime economy is a third of all hospitality at 1.2 million jobs. The nighttime economy happens after the 9 p.m. You know, we’re about those three, four, five, six hours. And so if the curfew is at 10 p.m. and everyone needs to be out, the last orders are at 9, 9, 15, you know.
8:16 So we just it just doesn’t work for us opening for three hours. And so that’s just it destroys the amount. It cuts in half the amount of time I could take revenue at my business. But more than that, it kills customer confidence. It stops people coming out.
8:34 You know, people want to come out to socialize. People want to come out to be around and with other people. That’s part of the fun of, you know, my business is creating great places where people can sit and socialize with their friends. And be around other people and feel that kind of like community, you know, vibe that it just lifts people. It’s what being human is about. And we’re not allowed to do that.
8:59 If people are going out to empty bars and empty restaurants or you can you travel into the center of London and you know, for two or three hours and then you’ve got to go back out back home or just hopefully stumble into something else. Much more dangerous than the regulated, licensed, highly sanitized, managed, distanced, one-way system, massed environments of bars and restaurants. You know, then we’re going to see infections rising. And this the media generally and this government, certainly this cabinet, seem to be obsessed by infections.
9:31 We should be concentrating on hospitalizations and deaths. They are what matters. You know, the number of infections I’m hearing today in March were probably around 230,000 a day. The government themselves have said there were at least 100,000. And we’re seeing front page news about 7,000 infections a day. I mean, I don’t understand the distortion, the obsession, the panic around these infections unless and until they start to lead to a significant number of deaths.
9:58 And that’s not been the case so far. And hopefully it won’t be the case. We can be fairly certain it won’t be, but no one seems to be behaving with the expectation that it won’t be. We just shut down everything just in case. And the consequences of that, the spin-on effects of that are disastrous for economy and for livelihoods.
10:22 And, you know, and I don’t know what stage this government will realize they’ve got to take a different approach because we can’t go on like this. I think Matt Hancock said in parliament a few days ago that their strategy is to suppress the virus, which is A, impossible. You can’t do that with viruses until we get a vaccine. And again, I think the received wisdom is clear. The vaccine is not going to be the answer. I think, you know, it’s just not. It’s not it’s going to help, but it’s not going to be the answer.
10:51 So we’ve got to learn to live with it. We’ve got to learn as a society, as individuals, as businesses, as communities to live with this virus and find a way through it. And this government don’t seem to have a clue about that. No strategy, no plan. And that is destroying lives and it’s destroying lives.
11:08 Yeah, they’re using this total number of cases as the one metric that they keep kind of throwing people’s faces to get them alarmed and show this graph of it going up. But, you know, in the last six months, we have a slew more testing. And yet it’s just they don’t talk about the percentages or anything. It’s just this one number that they compare and say now it’s time to look out. It’s this campaign of fear.
11:29 And like you said, the eat out to help out. It wasn’t really as much about the revenues. It was getting people comfortable after this massive campaign of fear and Armageddon that they could actually go to a pub or go to a bar and have a drink and not die. And people did it. And even for the employees, I’m sure for you and your team and your staff and your everybody had to feel comfortable.
11:48 And then right when it was just starting to see how we could open up, now they’re pulling the fear card again. What’s frustrating to me is that you’ve seen the mayor of Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester come out asking to reconsider the curfew and potentially reverse it. And yet the mayor of London, all I see him doing is continuing the narrative of fear. He’s always like, be careful. It’s scary. And I’m like, what about the economy here? It’s the backbone of all of our livelihoods. Is that frustrating for you as well?
12:20 Yeah, I mean, there’s a few points you’ve made there. I mean, I’ve said a couple of times, the second wave of coronavirus is the second wave of fear. And we need to move away from that. I think you’re right to mention the guys at North, the mayors. They are saying, listen, you’ve got to review this curfew because it’s doing more harm than good.
12:36 And we can see that from the streets after 10 o’clock. We can see that from the halls of residence to now becoming new prisons for young people. And you’re right about Sadiq Khan. I think he has been really disappointing throughout this pandemic. He’s not had a good pandemic and he’s been disastrous for London, really.
12:58 He’s just for a large part of it, he’s been absent. And then when he does speak up, he just doesn’t seem to get it for me. Listen, I’m not political, OK? I’m an apolitical person. I’ve not voted. I voted once in my entire life when I was 19.
13:15 I don’t really take sides. And in dealing with this virus, it’s not really a left wing or a right wing thing for me. It’s just about what’s the best thing. But I think Sadiq Khan has been absolutely useless and he’ll probably get voted back in, but he doesn’t deserve it on the basis of how poor he’s been throughout this pandemic. Yeah, it’s been frustrating. One of the things we saw with the 10 p.m. curfew, which again didn’t have any science in it.
13:42 I mean, even Professor Graham Medley on this age committee said that it was literally, quote unquote, never discussed with him. So our prime minister didn’t even discuss it with his scientific committee before that decree was put in place. And then when we saw it happen, everyone went out on the streets at 10 p.m. in this massive mob of people. And from there, what do they do? They go to the off license and then they go party in some other unregulated, unsanitized place.
14:08 I mean, you know, you could argue there’s more transmission on the back of this rule that then suck everybody on the streets at an exact time. I mean, that must be frustrating to watch as well for you. Incredibly. I mean, this law assumption that did a good interview recently where he’s focusing on the decision making process in government. And it seems this decision about the curfew was just made hastily. And it’s almost like someone around the table.
14:33 Maybe they’ve been drinking too much tequila or something. You know, just why don’t we try this? And someone says, yeah, that might do it. I’ll send a strong message. Well, it sent the wrong message, not a strong message.
14:43 It’s scapegoated hospitality, as we’ve established, one of the most important drivers of this economy, the UK’s economy. And it is going to lead directly to the closure of thousands of businesses and undoubtedly the loss of a million jobs. You know, and it just seems like they’re sat around chucking ideas out, you know, like it’s an ideation session. Let’s get creative, guys. And they came up with this stupid fucking curfew and they got to cancel it.
15:09 They have got to change. They must realize they’ve made a mistake. They must change their minds on it. And they must be big enough and bold enough to fuck the politics and the optics and just say, right. We were wrong about this. We’ve seen what’s happened. We understand that we’ve made a mistake.
15:27 We’re going to cancel this curfew. We’re going to look at some other methods. I’ve just been looking at PHE’s own published data from last, published on Friday last week, showing about the number of kind of contacts and how they see this virus spreading. And you can’t get the exact figure from the graph they produce. It’s pretty much 80 percent of this of all these infections is happening within the household.
15:51 You know, either from household members, families, you know, generation generations living together or just, you know, one generation living together or household visitors or visiting friends and relatives. It’s pretty much 80 percent, you know. And we’ve seen from PHE’s own traceable data that 2.8 percent, only 2.8 percent of infections could be traced to hospitality venues. I think 44 percent was universities and schools and 26 percent was care homes. We’re still killing people in care homes.
16:23 I was reading yesterday about the, I think, 87 cases of COVID in a hospital, you know, in the space of a few days. I mean, how do these things happen? You know, at the beginning of this pandemic, I think the first two or three months, 62 percent of all COVID deaths happened in care homes in the UK, which I just find astonishing. We made that mistake. Let’s not make it again. But it seems like we’re not learning from the past.
16:47 We’re not following the data to make decisions. And we’re creating more problems for ourselves through poor decision making. And that probably means that probably means we need new leadership, you know, because I don’t think Boris Johnson and his adviser and his adviser in chief really are capable of handling this crisis in the best interests of this country. And so I think, you know, we need a regime change. We need new leadership.
17:16 Yeah, we do. And you mentioned the GDP earlier. I mean, out of the G7 or even G20 countries, Britain had the worst contraction of GDP, worse than Germany, worse than France, worse than the USA. And it’s because this has been handled completely improperly. And yeah, these decisions seem to be arbitrary.
17:32 You mentioned the care home deaths. The problem with that is, first of all, there’s a lot of unnecessary deaths in care homes. But then the rest of the country is made to pay for a statistic that has never broken out to the public. So no one ever says, oh, by the way, this was a bunch of people in care homes that were over 85. And that’s why you can’t go to the pub after 10. They don’t say that. They say, you know, the sky is falling.
17:55 You have to worry. You’re all going to die. Your kids are going to die. So that’s why you have to do this. It’s they need the fear, I think, to get the public to do what they want to do. But it’s been overdone.
18:06 And I don’t know why the politicians are doing it. I think they’re doing it as an insurance policy because if something goes wrong, they can say they did something. I also think they’re doing it because if they change tack, it means everything they’ve told us for the past three to five months has been wrong. And then they have to admit they’re wrong, which I would love it if they could just we could just do a reset. You know, I think everyone would forgive them and we’d say, look, we didn’t have the data. We were panicked.
18:31 We were scared just like you. But guess what? From now on, we’re going to follow the science. We can get this GDP back up in the positive range probably within six months if we just made intelligent science based decisions. But Jonathan, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
18:44 Me neither. And it’s not just in the UK. It seems to be, you know, generally worldwide with a couple of notable exceptions. I think the front page of The Economist says, why are so many governments getting it wrong? And, you know, they don’t really answer the question, but that whack-a-mole approach of trying to suppress the virus, it pops up again, suppress it.
19:01 It’s just not working. That seems to be the approach from a lot of countries. And, you know, we’re obsessed. Boris seems to be obsessed by that. I think his judgment, this isn’t perhaps unfair to say, I think his judgment has been adversely affected by the fact that he contracted the virus and it hit him quite hard, it seems.
19:20 And there may be some ongoing effects there. But he needs to recognize that he may not be the best place to, you know, the most impartial now to make these decisions and find some people that can. You know, I understand it’s chaotic inside central government at the moment. You’ve got Treasury fighting against health. You know, I think we were on track.
19:42 I understand. I mean, this is all word, you know, whispers, but I understand that we were on track for the second lockdown and Treasury fought hard to prevent that. It seems we might be on track for some kind of new lockdown in Liverpool. I was hearing this morning from some friends in the press, you know, that’s happening imminently. I mean, you know, but we shouldn’t be lurching from one new rule restriction to the next.
20:04 There should be a plan, a strategy. It cannot be to suppress the virus until the vaccine arrives. That is a failing, failed strategy before we start on that. So they need to find a new way. I completely agree. When you look at Sweden, what do you see? Because they were criticized early for keeping things too open.
20:23 But now it seems like they’re avoiding all this second wave phenomenon. And for them, it’s it’s kind of some business as usual. They have some safe distancing, but, you know, people can go out and do their things. And I think the hospitality industry is functioning. Yeah. No, I mean, a lot of people point to Sweden. I don’t know enough about it, to be honest.
20:40 A lot of people point to Taiwan and Japan and these places, you know, I understand that a test and trace would make a big difference. Again, I’m not I don’t particularly understand why I feel reluctant to give my data. In fact, you know, before it was mandatory and when it was voluntary, if I went to a pub or a bar, I said, I don’t want to give you my name and my phone number. I think, you know, it feels like too much of a of a of a. It feels like snooping to me if this is a different government and they had a different approach and maybe have a bit more confidence in them.
21:13 But, you know, I’m I don’t I don’t want to. But anyway, if someone could explain to me why test and trace might save the day, then I could get on board with it. But I got the brain power at the moment or the headspace to to figure that out. I mean, I understand months ago, Tony Blair was saying, this is this is the answer. This is the answer. I don’t know if it is 10 million downloads of the app in the first few days.
21:37 You know, Matt Hancock was crying about that. Like, that’s a good thing. I don’t know if it is or not. I mean, I just don’t trust these guys anymore to be doing the right thing for this country. Yeah, it seems like, you know, the vaccine and the test and trace are just band-aids on a problem that we can prevent with intelligent policy.
21:53 And that doesn’t seem to be happening. Tell me about other things we can do. I mean, some of the things that obviously I’ve been talking about and I’m sure you have as well, which is, you know, business rates being dropped. Removing the congestion charge, for God’s sakes. I mean, twenty four seven congestion charge is ridiculous. It’s just going to hurt your business.
22:09 You talked about other things, VAT deferrals, lease forfeiture moratorium to prevent being locked down. I know that’s a really important thing from all the entrepreneurs I spoke to. Talk about that and some of your other ideas of how we can keep businesses going. Well, I think, you know, post-lockdown, you know, we panic those first few days when lockdown was announced. Everyone in mind thought, you know, this is it. We’re done.
22:33 And then Rishi came along with his furlough scheme, saved those millions of jobs, which was great. It’s cost of fortune. It’s too generous. It should have become sector specific and it should last for longer. But anyway, he came up with a business rates relief, which is a massive help for a lot of businesses.
22:48 He came up with some grants for smaller businesses, the twenty five thousand pound grants. None of my businesses qualify for them because we were over the rate of a value threshold. We’ve got some good stuff. There’s a VAT deferment and subsequently there’s a VAT reduction from twenty percent to five percent hospitality. We’ve had a lot of help. It’s been great. But the curfew is just as damaging for the nighttime economy.
23:09 It’s a lockdown in everything but name for the nighttime economy. And so then we were waiting for Rishi last week to come up with the goods on what he’s going to do to protect businesses and jobs post because of curfew. And he came up with nothing. He came up with that wage subsidy scheme, a job subsidy scheme, which is just a piece of shit. It’s where employers are required to pay fifty five percent for part time work from employee work.
23:34 Thirty three percent of the time. The maths don’t add up for fuck’s sake. You know, it’s just an absolute nonsense. And if that is it, then as I’ve said already, that’s a million jobs gone in my industry. And so, you know, it’s astonishing that they’ve not come up with something more.
23:49 I don’t know what’s happened there. He seemed to have a bottomless bag of taxpayer cash that was splashing. But he’s wasted it on things like this job retention bonus scheme, which would be great for protecting jobs that aren’t at risk. I thought the help out was good for customer confidence and great for the chains, but not really good for independent businesses. It didn’t help wet led businesses like pubs or bars at all because it only applied to food.
24:16 Ditto the VAT reduction from twenty five percent only applied to food, not on wet sales. So, you know, there’s a there’s a good section of my industry that’s had, you know, apart from business rate support, business rates relief for a year. We’ve had very little support. The furlough was great for employees to keep employees in place. But that doesn’t really help keep the business going. You know, I think people need to understand the businesses need cash to keep going.
24:40 If the staff are being paid through furlough, then great. That’s a big chunk of expense being dealt with. But there’s still a lot of other costs in the business that need sorting out. And we haven’t really had anything from that. Seabills, this was it one hundred and thirty three billion loan scheme issue.
24:55 Now, we will do whatever it takes. Sounded fantastic, you know. But again, for most businesses, I’ve been in business twenty three years. Right. I’ve got one. I’ve got a great track record. I’ve had some hiccups along the way.
25:08 My business, London Union, which owns Diner Armor in Shoreditch, is a phenomenally profitable. You know, we’ve been in business for five years since June now. We’ve got a really good track record. We couldn’t even borrow £250,000. We had our Seabills application rejected last week.
25:25 Don’t don’t understand the reason why they set off the record. It’s the curfew. You know, and they’re right. I think I actually posted online. They’re right to not back us because this curfew has killed us. So anyway, we’ve we’ve had some great support post lockdown.
25:40 We’ve had nothing post curfew and they need to do something about that. But it seems that it seems clear that they’ve just abandoned the nighttime economy. And it’s kind of like that’s the price we we’ve had to pay as a nation. We can’t afford to prop that part of the industry up any longer. They wouldn’t have needed to had they not brought in the curfew.
26:01 The best thing they can do now is to cancel it. Yeah. Even if they do cancel it, though, you’re saying that the businesses really need help for the next year, really. They need help recovering all the way into 2021 because it is going to be slow. And that’s why they need, you know, loans and support.
26:17 The business is not just the employees in the hospitality industry. Yes. Yeah. I mean, so I’m I started out this beginning of the year. I have five venues in London at the end of this year.
26:29 I’ll have one left that I won’t be allowed to open. It’s a large event space in Canada Water in Southern called Hawker House. You know, so that’s a two and a half thousand capacity venue. No one’s running events of that size or even close to it will be for the next until the vaccines around a year or so from now. We’ve all got used to this.
26:49 And so, you know, but I’ve got no business left. I mean, I’ll be putting my I’ve got a parent company in a subsidiary company. I’ll be putting my code subsidiary coming into liquidation next week. That’s the business. That’s the company that has owned and operated Dinah Armour, Hawker House, Giant Robot and Canary War and Model Market in Lewisham.
27:10 So we handed back the keys to Giant Robot. So our landlord Canary War group last week, we invested one point eight million there. That’s 40 plus jobs that we had there. There’s just no point going back there now. In the end, our landlord was very reasonable.
27:26 And so I’ll be left with nothing at the end of the ship from one side that I can’t open. And so I’m not going to need any government support. There’ll be a lot of people in a hanging on very precarious position that would benefit greatly from some government support. You know, but for me, it’s liquidation. It’s not administration.
27:45 We are not saving the business because there’s no business left to save because this curfew is killed as lockdown killed us and the lack of economic support for certain sectors of our industry is going to kill a lot more businesses apart from mine. How do you deal with that from a mental health perspective? And how do you speak to your team? Some of us have probably been with you for years, maybe more, when you have to let them off and let them go. And then what do they do with their lives?
28:13 My biggest regret and not shame, but almost throughout this whole thing has been I have not been. I’ve been so engrossed in trying to do what I can for our industry through this hospitality union group I sell. My biggest regret is that I was not able to communicate with my team as frequently and as effectively and as openly as I wanted to. It’s a few emails and a few WhatsApp messages to let people know whether we’re going to still be in business from the end of September or the end of June.
28:42 I’ve worked with some great people. We had 94-time staff at the beginning of the year and we had about 250 to 400 part-time seasonal staff around events as well. And they asked us some of the best people. People who work in hospitality look after people. They are personable, they are friendly, they take care of you.
29:04 And I’ve worked with some brilliant people these last 23 years. And none better than the people I’ve been working with at Dinah Armour and at Milk and Honey in the last few years. And 50% of people who work in hospitality are aged 16 to 24. There’s a lot of really good young people working in our industry. It’s often the first job. They learn some really important, soft interpersonal skills.
29:29 And it’s a shame that we’ve had guys with us from the beginning. London Uni has been going five years now with Dinah Armour. We’ve had people with us from the very, very beginning. Pierre, our general manager, the boss of Milk and Honey, he’s been the boss there for five years. And he’s going back to Paris in the next couple of weeks now.
29:50 He’s just given up on London because we’ve had to give up on Milk and Honey. And these little stories, there’s thousands, there’s tens of thousands of little stories like this about the good people in our industry who just kind of get lost and left to one side. We’ve done what we can. Everybody who works in our subsidiary operating company is going to get statutory residency and there are some good payouts there. That’s what we pay our national insurance for.
30:15 So there’s a bit of a safety net there for them. So it’s not so bad. And I think a lot of them enjoyed lockdown because the weather was good or because they could go back to Italy or Spain or Greece or France and just hang out with their parents and their friends from the old days. So I think it’s not been so bad, but it’s very disappointing because, you know, again, in this industry, you get into the place you represent, the place you work at. I mean, people who work at Milk and Honey love Milk and Honey. They’re proud to work there.
30:44 People who work at Dinerama, they think it’s one of the best places to be. And they love their work. And now that’s all gone. You know, it’s like it’s like ending a relationship in some respects. Yeah, it’s really hard to listen to all that.
30:57 No question, Jonathan, if I made you if I put you in charge tomorrow as the mayor or as the prime minister, what are some of the simple things you would do right away to solve this mess? Oh, I don’t want to be in charge and cancel that congestion charge. Find a way to get people back to work. We’ve got to get rid of this curfew. I mean, that’s a national thing.
31:21 I’m not sure the mayor of London’s got any power to do otherwise. I don’t know. I would organize. I don’t know. I’d start to support research and communication of what we’re really dealing with.
31:38 It needs to be a strong voice of opposition of is there another way of do we need, you know, is this the right way? There needs to be that. And that needs to come from influential figures, leaders. And it’s just not everybody is all piling behind the same wrong route. And, you know, we need a national treasure to step up and say, you know, are we sure about, you know, this approach?
32:07 Yes, people will die. That is inevitable and tragic. And, you know, but it’s going to happen anyway. I mean, we need people brave enough and, you know, well known enough. And with the right gravitas to just step up and and lead us in a different direction or question, you know, the way in which we’re being led at the moment and in an apolitical way.
32:31 And this is what would be good for the country. Let’s all please get behind it, because what’s happening right now is the worst possible thing for the country. And it’s got to stop. Yeah, I completely agree. We need some real leadership.
32:46 We need a proportionate response to this virus and we need science based decision making. And we need to make people and help people get back to work. It really is the lifeblood of this whole nation. It’s the reason London exists and we need to focus on that and find solutions, not find problems and fears. So, look, thank you for coming. I appreciate you.
33:07 I really like the fact that you put those numbers out from Public Health England and people can see that three percent of transmissions are happening and yet we’re locking down a massive sector of the economy. A million jobs going to be gone. What are these people going to do? And these economic impacts have health and death impacts as well. So, look, people need to listen. If this has resonated with you, you need to share this, talk about this, speak to your representatives. We could literally lift this curfew in days if we make enough noise.
33:36 So, let’s do that. Jonathan, I’m wishing you all the best. And I hope you can find some way to come back because we need great entrepreneurs like you because people like you are the culture of London. It’s why people come because there’s places like Milk & Honey because someone’s been creative and put yourself out there and invested capital to create these great experiences. That’s what this city is about.
33:56 You know, when you close for good, we miss the bits of culture and it’s a shame. And so, yeah, I hope you come back. Thank you. I will. Okay, good. I hope so.
34:07 All right, Jonathan, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate this. Let’s get this word out and I hope everyone’s listening and we can really find some solutions here. So, thank you so much, Jonathan, and I look forward to seeing you again sometime. All right. She’s doing what you’re doing. Thank you.
34:21 Okay, cool. Thank you very much. And thank you, everybody. We’ll see you next time on London Real.
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