More than ever, we now need to have one voice

Dead in the middle of the silly season, as journalists are apt to callit, I joined Caterer & Hotelkeeper. Appropriate, I thought mournfully, as I came to grasp the scale of what my colleagues and I were expected to report on.

Silly me, for taking on the challenge. Lucky me, because I did. It has been infinitely rewarding to have been involved with a broad-based, creative industry dependent to an unusual degree on traditional craft and people-management skills. It is an industry which is international in outlook and inspiration, and closely linked to the expanding business of tourism.

Fawlty attitudes

Yet, regardless of season, a general sort of silliness has always been around in the industry, a failure to act cohesively, a preference for the quirky and eccentric. Take the letter from Warren Hawksley MP, published in Caterer (15 August). He is going to drop German wines from his hotel's wine list in retaliation for Germany's proposals to ban British beef. Basil Fawlty lives.

Why does Mr Hawksley not have a go, instead, at those who allowed contaminated meat products into cattle feed and triggered the BSE problem? For that, we in this country have to face the consequences. And we are not alone. The threat posed by the disease has been damaging to beef farmers on the Continent as well as to our own. Meanwhile, nobody knows whether the disease passes to humans through the food chain, but it looks increasingly likely.

As blindly chauvinistic as Mr Hawksley's letter is the article attacking mass tourism published in the Spectator of 17 August. It was written by Lady Thatcher's former political advisor, Sir Alfred Sherman. He complains of the "inconvenience, hardship and misery inflicted by mass tourism on those who live or work in central London". Well, he might try, but Sir Alfred would find it hard to convince London hoteliers and restaurateurs, and the British Tourist Authority, the London Tourist Board and the British Hospitality Association, that his suffering is for nothing. More silliness.

Which brings me to the industry's trade association, the British Hospitality Association. It should be the industry's most effective defence against silliness. It comes as close as our industry can get to having a single voice. Yet the BHA still accounts for little more than 10% of the vast, untidy collection of hotels, restaurants and institutional, contract and outside caterers which qualifies as the hospitality industry.

The 20,000 establishments that it represents do not go very far. The figure includes individual members of local hotel associations affiliated to the BHA, and several thousand individual outlets of hotel and restaurant chains and of contract caterers. These benefit from their groups' corporate memberships but are not members in their own right.

Messy world

Beyond the BHA's core of largely corporate members, perhaps 2,000 in all, there is a big, indifferent, messy world. It consists of thousands of individual operators of hotels, restaurants and catering companies, to say nothing of guesthouses and B&Bs. They are, as much as the big restaurant and hotel chains, at the heart of our tourism and hospitality industry. They are, for the most part, represented by no national trade association. They share in no single voice.

Indifference

It is they, or at least a large proportion of them, whom the BHA has always sought to bring into the fold, and failed. Indifference, apathy and suspicion about the benefits of belonging have been the enemies. Yet the need for a recognised community of small as well as large businesses in the hotel and restaurant industry has never been greater.

With such a community, detractors of tourism and their narrow-minded, xenophobic attitudes could more easily be marginalised. More importantly, there could be a truly democratic, corporate approach to the management, lobbying power and promotion of the UK's largest,most important service industry.

Jeremy Logie's enthusiastic plans to reshape the BHA are encouraging to read (15 August), but his task is uphill. It consists not so much of overcoming the "fuddy duddy image" to which he refers, but of winning over the fuddy duddies who have been reluctant to join the BHA so far.

Other organisations - consortia, guide books which require paid entries, and regional tourist boards, to name but a few - are competing for the time and funds which membership of the BHA calls for. It's a tough market, in or out of the silly season.