Licensed Trade Hero 2020 is a brand new category at this year’s Scottish Bar & Pub awards reflecting the times we’re living through and this got us thinking about Hospitality Heroes that have gone above and beyond during the Covid crisis. Today we honour Donald Macleod MBE, Director of Hold Fast Entertainment, Glasgow and NTIA Advisory Board member.
Donald MacLeod has just written to Nicola Sturgeon suggesting alternatives to current curfew and music restrictions with “many premises losing between 50% and 75% of their most profitable trading hours” and he’s long banged the drum for the Scottish licensed trade.
He’s also on the advisory board for the NTIA (Night Time Industries Association) and has never been one to shrink-wrap his views and of course, being very vocal about what the Covid crisis has done to Scotland’s night-time economy.
Said Donald, “I don’t know about being a hero – it’s about survival. We are all struggling and it’s good to see that people are stepping up to make their voices heard. I have said from day one that this would be catastrophic and we must fight back.
“It’s only lately that we have been consulted by the Scottish government like me and Mike Grieves from the NTIA had a meeting with Jamie Hepburn, minister for business with absolutely no mention of the tier system. Nightclubs would be on level zero, how stupid. There are almost no advisors for industry.”
And we’ve got to mention his MBE too of course, conferred last month for services to music and charity Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy in Scotland, plus he also reopened The Garage on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street as a temporary indoor beer garden called The Electric Gardens after the venue had been closed for seven months.
