You may have seen the headline screaming “Government tells pubs to serve warm beer” to counter rising energy costs. This, of course, looks like another attempt by Labour to deflect attention away from the way it has handled the crisis in hospitality.

Apart from one key point: it isn’t true. It doesn’t even take a huge amount of Googling to recognise there’s a massive disparity between the clickbait headline and what the actual policy is as most the articles contain the information – which is pretty dry to be honest. 

I’ll try to sum it up without this becoming a press release. It seems the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has offered 525 hospitality businesses access to a tool which it says has helped reduce overnight energy consumption.

Turning fridges off after closing. That’s the story, if you can call it a story. This isn’t Ed Miliband going around pub cellars fiddling with the Hive whenever he sees Cask Marque officials leaving boozers with their thermometers. Sadly.

What this instead shows is how so much outrage can be generated by social media for two reasons. The first is pretty obvious that nowadays people don’t have the time or patience to read articles and much rather post about how much they hate politicians, which I get especially when publications like the Telegraph care more about clicks than journalism and promote whatever political party helps it avoid the most tax.

The second is even more alarming and is that, when it comes to the pub, fake news is becoming so intrinsically linked to it that I’m surprised that this phenomenon hasn’t inspired a beer – Fake Brews?

Writing alarming stuff about pubs is an easy way to get someone’s attention as there’s so much sincere concern about why so many hospitality businesses are closing, threatened or are struggling.

And this is where politicians have to shoulder the entire blame because instead of explaining why most of our high streets are becoming such a mess they’ve created a vacuum which is being filled with easy answers, which is the hallmark of populism.

It’s also wholly convenient for some of them to do so. Take Reform’s planned policy to reduce the price of the pint by reinstating the two-child benefit cap – two seemingly unrelated things, which are so unrelated that I had to use the vague, countable noun.

It’s a bit like using a random policy generator website to come up with ideas like “reduce football ticket prices by hiring more junior doctors”. Or a Tory leader telling us that we all should rugby tackle shoplifters.

What Reform’s policy conveniently sidesteps is maybe we’re in this mess because of tax-dodging corporations unleashing a form of disaster capitalism that’s led to an enshittification of Britain. It’s worth blaming the bankers for that and I can think of one former commodity trader turned party leader who probably deserves your ire more than most.

And if you think I’m being a raging leftie lurching into hyperbole just take a look at the data here into how private equity firms have reshaped your local, especially this part where Lauren Leek says: “The regions that lost most pubs are the regions where ownership was most consolidated under leveraged pubco models. When Ei Group raised rents to service its debt, it was tenants in Sunderland and Burnley who couldn’t pay, not tenants in my dear Islington.”

But, you know, save the pub by giving birth to fewer children.

This sorry mess is made worse by the pub “experts” who should be calling this rubbish out and shaming publications that refuse to explain why our locals are being shuttered.

It’s a dire situation that even I don’t have any easy answers for. But that in itself is the solution – we don’t need quick fixes but a total overhaul of how our economies are structured. And we need to explain exactly how we’ve got to this mess in the first place.

In the meantime be wary of anyone trying to make political capital out of the pub and any publication that seeks to use beer as clickbait. If you truly love pubs, do some proper research when you see a headline that enrages you, or better still turn off your computer, go down your (still-standing) local, have a nice cold pint and wait for all this to blow over.