They're not bad, certainly cheap, often the only place around. But they do tend to attract an older crowd, do have a lot of food moving around and don't have music. So they're not the sort of place you'd include if you had a classic British pub crawl planned. That's not sneering, just horses for courses.

... the boss pushing brexit seems a pretty good reason.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Martin_(businessman)

Agreed that he's not a great person, but that's no reason to sneer at the customers.