J Mark Dodds FRSA

@jmarkdodds.bsky.social

1346 Followers 1829 Following

Born 314 ppm #SavingBritainsPubs Reimagining the Public House fit for 21st century purpose to bring #PeoplePowered #FossilFuelFree pubs into the commons www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2023/9/25/peoples-pub-partnership

Screenshot of tweet where Dan Neidle is annoyed over a post telling him he is a bully
This is a screenshot of the header of an article in Substack which in itself is a republshed piece from The Mint Magazine by J Mark Dodds It's headed The British Pubs Crisis. A Few Too Many? All for the Love of Pubs (the title of the Substack and soon to be coming podcast There is also a portrait of the author and the header from the Mint Magazine logo and a badge saying that it was one of 2025's top-read articles in the Mint magazine
Screenshot of a Telegraph business news article headlined “Guy Hands eyes bid for venues owned by Britain’s biggest pub chain.” The subheading states that the private equity investor is reportedly considering a £300 million offer for around 300 Stonegate pub sites. The article, by industry editor Matt Oliver and published on 7 June 2026, features a large portrait photograph of an older man with grey hair and glasses seated against a dark background. The image caption notes that his investment firm has been involved in some of the century’s most controversial deals. The article appears within the newspaper’s business section, with navigation links visible across the top of the page. The page includes The Telegraph masthead, navigation menus, and a “Save Our Pubs” campaign logo in the sidebar.
Screenshot of a Bluesky exchange about an AI-generated video reportedly shared by Donald Trump and the White House. The embedded clip shows Trump appearing to shove Stephen Colbert into a large green dumpster. Above it, Alessandro Rigolon comments: “Horrifying. Incredibly dark shit that reminds me of the fascism my grandparents in Italy told me about.” A red circle highlights the fact the post has been liked 101 times. The image is shared to point out the irony that the user has accidentally liked another post one-on-one, after a similar incident earlier in the week.
Close-up photograph of the underside of a metal jar lid with a reddish-orange outer rim and cream-coloured centre. Printed in black lowercase text are the words: “integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching”. The image has a warm tone and slightly soft focus, giving it the feel of a reflective or motivational social media graphic.
Screenshot of an Ai response to the prompt “Matthew Syed who is he”. The response describes Matthew Syed as a British journalist, author, broadcaster, and speaker focused on mindset, performance, and human behaviour. The screenshot includes two sections titled “Professional Profile” and “Background”, with bullet points stating: He writes for The Times and The Sunday Times He wrote books including Bounce and Black Box Thinking He hosts the BBC Radio 4 podcast Sideways He advises organisations on growth mindsets He was British number-one table tennis player He competed in the 1992 and 2000 Olympics He studied PPE at Oxford University At the bottom, the response asks whether the user would like more information about his books or sports achievements.
The image shows the word “NO” painted in rough white brushstrokes across a decaying wooden surface, with peeling layers exposing older material beneath. The weathered texture gives it a stark, confrontational quality — less like a polished sign and more like an improvised refusal or act of resistance. The deterioration around the lettering creates a sense of exhaustion, neglect, or long-term pressure, while the simplicity of the single word makes the message feel absolute and uncompromising.
An infographic titled "A guide to making people centred pubs the centre of community." It features a colorful circular diagram with a dark central core reading "Convene Around Pubs." The diagram illustrates pubs as vital community hubs and focal points for future society—serving as base camps for an uncertain world through pillars like "Develop an Entrepreneurial Edge," "Take a System Focus," and "Build a Shared Ethos." This guide perfectly illustrates how we can transform pubs into the ultimate community hubs for the future. In a world moving toward sustainable, 15-minute cities, pubs can serve as low-carbon "base camps"—anchoring local economies, hosting fossil-fuel-free businesses, and reducing our environmental footprint by keeping resources entirely local. 🍻🌍
This is a still clip from a promotional video for Long Live the Local Campaign that was launched in 2018 and still by goes on to this day (24.05.2026) actor Ray Winstone, among other celebrities, was recruited to tell a story asking the government to reduce tax on pubs and beer - a campaign paid for the same hedge and private equity funded offshore based pub companies and global brewers that are running pubs into the ground through profiteering supply prices and aggressive debt driven Rentierism He's wearing sunglasses and looks a bit rough around the edges and probably is talking with a Jack the Lad London accent. The subtitles say "The only place we can actually meet now is in a pub and we're losing them" He's not wrong; pubs ARE closing forever everywhere but it's because when they've been chronically underinvested for decade they're so rub down we stop going to the pub
A roadside sign in capital letters: "The light at the end of the tunnel is a train, with a gloomy background sky."
Image. Two separate photographs, side by side. On the right is Elon Musk dressed all black with black baseball cap. He's grimacing with an expression that looks like 'what the fuck I don't care'. The right hand photo is of English racist rabble rousing grifter, real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon who goes by the name Tommy Robinson, casually dressed in white t shirt and black bomber jacket, looking performatively serious, in the front of a crowd of angry looking white men, all facing forward to the camera on a rally, with British flags in the background... Captioned thus across the top of the 2 photos: MUSK'S MARCH FOR TYRANNY Then across the bottom is: Elon Musk tells Tommy Robinson protesters that "left is party of murder'
Photo of poster on London Underground close up of words, in white, capitalised, saying WE'RE LOOKING OUT FOR YOU On a black strip backing for the letters with the whole statement on a flat green ground
Screengrab of results to search query: "how much spend on global beers advertising uk 2025" Premiumisation & Marketing Spend: Major global brewers are focusing on premiumisation to drive value. Heineken, for example, plans to lift its marketing spend to more than 10% of revenue in 2025 to support key brands and their 0.0% segment. Mass Marketing Dominance: The UK beer market continues to be dominated by global players such as AB InBev, Heineken, Carlsberg, and Molson Coors. AB InBev has maintained a global marketing spend of around $7bn a year, a trend expected to continue. Digital and Retail Media Growth: Retail media is the fastest-growing ad spend channel in 2025 (+21.9%), attracting alcohol brands, although some are hesitant due to cost and logistics.
1 Supply, Demand, and the UK Pub Market – Q&A Q: Can you give me a very quick summary of what supply and demand economics is? Supply and demand economics explains how prices are set in markets. Supply is how much producers offer at different prices; demand is how much consumers want. Prices rise when demand exceeds supply, fall when supply exceeds demand, and settle where the two balance.
Screenshot of a 'Reel' Of 'politician' Nigel Farage advertising gold bullion. It has Farage's face talking with captions stating I BET NO ONE HAS EVER TOLD YOU BEFORE... With sub heading Top Secret: You can add... This is to illustrate how everything we hold as secure and dependable, like politicians being politicians not being grifting fly by night self enriching scumbags shitstirring racist rhetoric spouting lies and blatant misrepresentations that scare whole swathes of the population into fearing for their lives and communities... All paid for at our government's expense, with the intention of eroding our government. Apologies for this going beyond a description of the image
Image - photo of article by Marie Le Compte in The New World January 2026 issue. The author argues that Britain has an “all-or-nothing” culture, especially around health, drinking, and self-control. We value dramatic extremes, crash diets, total abstinence, intense fitness regimes — and dismiss slow, ordinary change, even though moderation is what actually works. Using everyday examples, she suggests this pattern is cultural: we binge, then repent, finding it easier to give things up completely than to learn balance. Her core point is that most people should be able to enjoy small pleasures without guilt or self-destruction, and that sustainable, imperfect moderation is healthier and more realistic than cycles of excess and denial. The following is highlighted text from her article “Because none of these changes were especially drastic, it took months for the pounds to start dropping.” “Why did talking about it make me curl up with embarrassment, then? Easy: because people wanted to hear something else.” “Occasionally I get carried away and drink too much but, on nine pub nights out of 10, I leave after I’ve finished my two medium glasses of white wine, even if I’d rather stay out.” “Mild consistency is better than brief bouts of excess, no matter how impressive or well-meant they are.” “Again: no one wants to know that, least of all Brits.” “Mildness in weather, character and social mores is what defines you as a place.” “Is learning moderation really that much harder than deciding to shun something altogether?” “Why not just commit to going once a week now, but keep doing it even after February comes around?” “Why not decide to add 30 alcohol-free days to your year instead of bunching them up together?” “For most of us, it ought to be possible to dabble in guilty pleasures without ruining our lives in the process.” “I had a dry day yesterday, and I definitely deserve a lovely glass of something cold to deal with this endless, dark, damp month.”
Cover of the book 'TOGETHER' by Ece Temelkuran 'A manifesto against the heartless world'
This is 2 images. On the right is front cover of the definitive story of the British Public House' 20th Century Pub by Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey. They are beer writers who, like all beer writers and the Guild of British Beer Writers write eloquently about beer but NEVER write about the inconvenient detail of why British pubs, the ONLY places where the beers they love can be dispensed and enjoyed sensibly have been closing in catastrophic numbers everywhere for the last 5 decades, since the Campaign for Real Ale first brought this cultural disaster of Britain's unique secular social heritage to wide attention in 1971 since when 40,000 pubs have closed forever and still accelerating in 2026. The image to the right is an excerpt from the book which quotes me, J Mark Dodds, the person posting this, and is the ONLY significantly accurate indication in the book of why pubs are closing everywhere. The quote text is as follows: POWER TO THE PEOPLE One popular conspiracy theory has it that pubcos deliberately drive marginally viable pubs into the ground to justify such sell-offs. Publican J. Mark Dodds is an outspoken campaigner for the rights of pubco tenants who views pubcos as 'asset strippers': These [pub closures] are regarded as the isolated odd story of one pub or another that: 'sadly is no longer economically viable (according to the freeholder), even though there is a whole community up in arms about it, saying they NEED a pub WANT a pub, and will put money into saving their pub, IF they get the chance to save it. And carpers-on say, If you didn't want to lose it you should have used it - while completely missing the point that the pub was not used because it was deliberately run down to make it unviable' and suitable for sale.' Cheerfully optimistic observers tend to argue, first, that the pubs being lost are generally bad ones - that there is a form of Darwinism in action."
This is a purple background graphic with text next to a black-and-white portrait of Søren Kierkegaard. The text quotes Kierkegaard comparing disaster denial to a clown warning of a real fire, while the audience laughs and applauds, mistaking the warning for a joke. Verbatim it says: A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater.” Søren Kierkegaard Danish Philosopher (Copenhagen, Denmark) 1813–1855
Alt text: Comic-style meme of Batman slapping Robin. Robin shouts “VIOLENT REVOLUTION!” and Batman replies, “POPULAR MASS MOVEMENT FOR #SavingBritainsPubs!” — a humorous take urging peaceful, collective action to save pubs instead of chaos.