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Despite the beautiful weather Cornwall had last week, it wasn’t commercially viable for the St Kew, the St Tudy, The Maltsters in the Amble or many of the village pubs near me to open. Then

there are those without outdoor space — two out of five pubs and restaurants. Each day closed for them is another business destroyed, jobs lost, and a cost to the industry of £200 million.

And what makes it worse is that the evidence shows that hospitality venues are not a major source of Covid infection, but that most serious infections take place in hospitals and care homes.

At the start of the pandemic there was the understandable assumption that hospitality venues might be responsible for Covid spread. Visions of drunken people in crowded pubs are an easy and

obvious target. But more than a year later, we now have hard data and evidence, so we don’t need to rely on assumptions, prejudice and guesswork any more. Pubs and restaurants are safe –

“nowhere near the top of my risk radar,” said Greg Fell, Director of Public Health on Sheffield City Council. Even the chancellor knows this. In defending the government’s Eat Out to Help

Out scheme he said analysis of PHE data had revealed “a very small percentage” of the causes of transmission were hospitality settings, and cautioned against us “jumping to simplistic

conclusions”. The Treasury has even pointed to a negative relationship between hospitality venues and transmission. The biggest risk factor for a serious infection in the community is having

visited a hospital recently. Yet hospitality venues closed when they were told to, met and went beyond the safety standards set by the government, were deemed safe by ministers last summer

— when we hadn’t vaccinated over 32 million adults — and the public were subsidised by the taxpayer to come and visit us. Advertisement Today the government’s re-opening programme has jumped

to the most devastating and irrational of “simplistic conclusions”. First we had the “scotch egg” mess at the end of last year, which Sacha Lord defeated. Then came the ludicrous 10pm

curfew, and now we have the roadmap where “non-essential” shops can open a full five weeks before indoor hospitality. With the government refusing to even to meet with hospitality

businesses, we had no choice but to take legal action, not only on behalf of all those whose lives and livelihoods in our industry have been ruined. But because this approach to governing is

dangerous for the whole country. The government’s own data show that the vast majority of fatal infections since the epidemic began originate in hospitals and care homes — not in the

general community. Yet ministers keep using pubs and restaurants as a smokescreen. If we continue to allow ourselves to be governed like this, we will make exactly the same mistakes in

future pandemics. Infection controls in hospitals and healthcare institutions are the fundamental thing that needs to be improved. Patients with infectious viruses or other diseases should

be isolated immediately in infection secure facilities, completely separated from other patients and treated only by properly protected staff dedicated to those specific isolated areas. The

“British Variant” originated in a patient being treated in a hospital in Kent, but was allowed to infect other hospital patients and staff, then escape into the community. Even the latest

“Indian variant” appears to be centred around one care home. Surely we should be focusing on this rather than needlessly harming the hospitality industry? Advertisement Our case is a David

and Goliath fight against the British establishment. But wherever our case ends, this is about learning lessons for the future, about properly examining how infectious diseases should be

handled in hospitals and care homes, and about improving government so that it is nimble in the face of new data. It was with great sadness that Sacha and I had to take our own government to

court. But when ministers so irrationally say they don’t “intend to debate the sufficiency or nature of the evidence and data relied on” when so many livelihoods are at stake, and when the

real heart of the pandemic is in such a different setting to pubs and restaurants, that sort of arrogance, diversion and inefficiency needs to be called out. We won’t ever be able to repair

our health, recover our social lives or build back better if we allow those in power to lock us up and shut down the country without reason, or to single out one industry as a smokescreen to

distract from failings elsewhere. Our democracy should be better than this and on behalf of all those who have been affected by government measures, and those of us who cherish British

democracy, freedom and rational, evidence-based government, I hope that this legal case provides some hope for the future. HUGH OSMOND IS FOUNDER OF PUNCH TAVERNS