Going back about 25 years or so pop stars, celebrities, and other people who were famous for being famous began to wear baseball caps. It started in America. It became cool. If you wore your baseball cap the wrong way round it was even cooler. It spread to Europe and the UK and before long everyone under 30 was wearing a baseball cap. Even the fact William Hague, the (then) young leader of the Conservative Party wore one wasn’t enough to put people off. This is sometimes called “fashion” or “the latest craze”. It’s what happens when people whose brainpower isn’t sufficient to blow their hats off decide it’s probably safe to wear one. People yearn for a sense of belonging, and so the wearing of a baseball cap became a way of signalling “I am one of you”.

 

But this desire to signal to others that you have joined their tribe, or to castigate others who haven’t joined yours, isn’t limited to harmless sartorial fads; it applies to ideas and in particular it applies to moral ideas. Some people like nothing better than sitting in judgement of how other people live their lives. Television soap operas have trained them in how to do it. And if they can wag their forefinger at other peoples’ behaviour, whilst advocating a “better way of life”, then not only does this provide them with a means of occupying the moral high-ground, it thereby signals how virtuous they are.

 

“Virtue-signalling” is very much in vogue at the moment. We’ve seen numerous examples of it in recent months. For example, Dr Sarah Wollaston MP, who chairs the Commons select committee on health, is an inveterate virtue-signaller. Her one-sided trial of the sugar industry predictably resulted in a call for the government to introduce a “sugar tax” on fizzy drinks. She was aided and abetted in this by poster-boy Jamie Oliver who has applied a sugar tax to such drinks in his restaurants. This is a classic example of virtue-signalling, because if you look at the amount of sugar in his Eton mess you can clearly see that his actions are designed to send out a “me too” signal of virtue whilst hoping no one notices that he isn’t really serious (about anything).

 

Virtue-signalling, like fashion fads, has all the characteristics of a virus. It spreads to people who haven’t got good intellectual immune systems. And so it is that we hear the NHS is about to introduce a faux tax on sugary drinks in its hospital eateries. No doubt someone will produce a mathematical model that shows how effective this has been in tackling the “obesity crisis” that threatens to “bankrupt the NHS”. This will be used as a means of persuading government to introduce it more widely. Meanwhile Public Health England can puff itself up with self-righteous moral virtue at how it is leading by example (at some financial cost to patients). If you’re forced to cancel hospital parking charges I guess you have to recoup the money somehow.

 

And then there is the dogged determination of the SNP government in Scotland to introduce minimum unit pricing. It must have been so gratifying for it to attend the conference of the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance (temperance cranks), which it hosted last year in Edinburgh, and be acclaimed as “Scotland the Brave”. Let’s hope this is some solace for it because in the wake of this the European Court of Justice effectively ruled minimum pricing contrary to EU trade law.

 

Finally, there is our hapless chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies. Dame Sally was prepared to abandon 90 years of science that proved the protective health effects of moderate drinking in order to justify new “low risk” drinking guidelines of just 14 units a week for both men and women. Virtue-signallers love simple messages because they instinctively believe ordinary folk are too thick to understand anything even slightly complex. I can’t decide whether Dame Sally did this to signal to the other members of the “public health” racket she is one of them, whilst knowing this was bunk, or whether she was leaned on to compromise the science in the name of creating a new factoid: “there is no safe level of drinking”. Predictably, all the other fuss-buckets who earn their livings from flapping around in the unhappiness of others signalled their agreement – Alcohol Concern, the Institute for Alcohol Studies, Professor Gilmore from the Alcohol Health Alliance, and countless foot soldiers from local councils who have now been placed in charge of “public health” – all said “me too”.

 

You could be forgiven for thinking they were all engaged in a conspiracy. But actually you don’t need to imply a conspiracy when they all think alike. I quite like baseball caps now they’re no longer fashionable. I wonder how long it will take for virtue-signalling to go out of fashion. It can get awfully cold up there on the moral high-ground.

 

While propping up the bar in a packed pub the week before Christmas enjoying a saison from London-based brewer Brew By Numbers, my friend suggested nobody carries cash anymore. The evidence being that we seemed to be the only people in the place paying with good old notes. The rest of the pub’s clientele were showing a distinct preference for using contactless cards. Since then I’ve found although I’m clearly not the only person in the country still using cash to pay for food and drinks, I’ve noticed a definite upswing in the use of contactless as a way to pay in the leisure and hospitality industry.

 

It’s not just based on my minimal anecdotal evidence because there are some hard numbers out there to support the argument for contactless’ growth. Research from Barclaycard found spending in pub, bars and restaurants via contactless card technology nearly doubled between September and the end of December. Pubs and bars experienced a 92% jump in usage while fast food increased 62% and restaurants enjoyed a 51% upturn.

 

There are a number of factors at play here. Firstly, the contactless payment limit was increased on September 1 from £20 to £30, which was a major driver of increased usage in restaurants where a higher average spend is expected when compared with say convenience stores and other such retail outlets. Even before the increase it had been calculated that 4% of the value of transactions undertaken in pubs and bars were from contactless. Expect this number to have increased somewhat when the new statistics are published.

 

Secondly, there is the high level of readers now out in the marketplace, and they are switched on! When I first gave contactless a go a couple of years back, I tried it in a number of Pret A Manger outlets – which was an early adopter – but they were frequently switched off due to lack of use and the employees were largely unaware of how to use them. This was a real problem because, although many people were walking around with contactless cards in their pockets, they were oblivious of the card’s payment capability because there was no encouragement from operators for them to be used for contactless payments.

 

Thirdly, there is a seriously high level of ownership of smart mobile devices in the UK and this is growing beyond phones to also include connected devices like watches and wristbands. It is possible to use these as well as contactless payment cards.

 

Fourthly, the launch of Apple Pay gave the oxygen of publicity to contactless and contributed to it quickly becoming a much more mainstream activity over the past year. And be in no doubt it is not just being used by male youngsters based in London. Barclaycard found half of contactless users are aged over 50, and 45% are female. And it is the city of Leeds that is experiencing the greatest growth in use – up 211% over the past year, while other locations like Edinburgh, Newcastle and, wait for it, Blackpool are all delivering year-on-year growth of over 190%.

 

Finally, many consumers are now using some of the payment/loyalty apps on their smart devices, which have been hitting the market, including MyCheck. They are becoming increasingly intelligent and moving well beyond simple payment tools – albeit with clever bill splitting capabilities – to also use customers’ data, such as transaction histories, to make recommendations and to deliver them relevant promotions.

 

It seems pretty clear the trend for contactless is likely to continue to accelerate at some pace – especially when the research also found a hefty 19% of people stated they get annoyed if they are not offered the option of paying with contactless cards or smart devices.

 

The Fuller’s-owned Parcel Yard pub in King’s Cross station recently had a customer complain when a member of staff inserted his contactless card into the hand-held payment terminal and expected him to key in his PIN. Oh, the hassle of having to enter four digits. But this expectation from a growing number of customers the default payment method is contactless surely has to be recognised by the industry. The day of the seamless transaction is upon us. Customers are demanding it and operators should be falling over themselves to avoid putting obstacles in the way customers’ wish to pay.

 

The way things are going, I reckon by next Christmas I’ll likely be joining them at the bar with my smartphone at the ready to pay for the next round. And woe-betide any bar or restaurant that expects me to enter my PIN or, perish the thought, get some grubby cash out of my pocket.