Like a drink in your local, do you? If so, Labour have declared war on your sort, you dirty anti-social bastards, you.
April 2008: Duty increased 6% above inflation.
Excise duty on alcohol is to rise by six percentage points above inflation from midnight on Sunday in a bold effort to curb Britain's steadily creeping drinking habit, the chancellor revealed today.
November 2008: Duty increased by 8%.
The pub trade was angered last night by the news that alcohol duty will rise by 8 per cent on Monday, offsetting the cut in VAT.
April 2009: Duty increased by 2% above RPI.
Chancellor Alistair Darling announced that the Government will go ahead with an increase in alcohol duty of 2 per cent.
Still to come: In January 2010, VAT will be increased by 2.5%.
There are at present no plans to reverse this increase when the VAT rates are increased from 1 January 2010.
When you add it all up, this means that since Alistair Darling's first budget 15 months ago, the price of your pint, merely due to government intervention, has increased by over 19%.
Actually, no. It's more than that, as this exchange in the commons yesterday points out.
Greg Hands (Shadow Minister, Treasury; Hammersmith & Fulham, Conservative)
Can the Minister explain how the Government's escalator currently works? Is it still based on RPI plus 2 per cent.? If so, at a time when RPI is negative, why was the increase in beer duty nevertheless 2 per cent.?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry (Parliamentary Secretary, HM Treasury; Portsmouth North, Labour)
Because we work on a zero base. It is an increase of 2 per cent. on zero, and it would not go back below that figure even though inflation is negative, so it is staying at 2 per cent.
The alcohol duty escalator, of which Darling is so fond, stated that duty was to be increased year on year by 2% above the Retail Prices Index. Except when the RPI dips into the negative, it would seem. When that happens, the Treasury mysteriously misplaces its calculator and can't seem to figure out what RPI plus 2% should actually be.
Or maybe doesn't want to. What do you reckon?
RPI was running at -1.1% at last count, according to National Statistics.
So make that an increase, in tax terms, to your pub visit, of around 20%.
The reasoning, as usual with Labour, is to protect your health whether you like it or not. But in the very same debate yesterday, a salient point was admitted which shows all this up as a sham of the highest order.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry (Parliamentary Secretary, HM Treasury; Portsmouth North, Labour)
In the Treasury Committee on 28 April, a member of the experts' panel, Mr. Weale from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, said:
"with beer...All the evidence is that"
it is
"not terribly price sensitive."
Just a thought here, but if the aim of these duty increases is truly to reduce drinking for the good of our health, and the government are fully aware that beer is price-insensitive. Does one Labour hand have a clue as to what the other is doing?
Alternatively ... isn't this just a massive tax designed to raise income and (like other Labour puritan measures) nothing what-so-fucking-ever to do with health?
Where are the BBPA and CAMRA attack dogs on this? Still enjoying having your tums tickled, are you?
* Title nod to Elizabeth Barrett Browning
