At Budget time Chancellors are always blind to the brewing industry. They make claims, like George Osborne did two days ago, that their budgets are good for Britain and good for British industry.
Well brewing is a British industry. In fact, once upon a time, it was Britain's biggest industry. It helped create the capital to make Britain the most dynamic economy the world had ever seen. However, brewing is a 'making things industry' and there hasn't been a British Chancellor insterested in one of those for many a long year.
So what did Osborne do, he put up beer duty by 7.2% meaning that as a tax beer duty has now risen by 33% since 2008. Does this raise more money for the cash-strapped through its own incompetence Treasury? No.
Why not? Because, as has been pointed out by research by the Society of Independent Brewers, the British Beer and Pubs Association, the Morning Advertiser, the Publican and the British Food and Beverage Industries Suppliers' Association, the point has long been passed when increasing beer duty increases the revenues from beer duty.
The driver behind this tax increase - entirely unremarked by the usual Budget pundits - is not financial but moral. There is a prohibitionist tendency within the Department of Health that believes that the public finances would be improved if we all drank less. They seem to have captured the Treasury.
If you read my previous blog entry (go on, be the first), you will see that this view is bollocks. Prof De Witte explained to the MPs (and the DoH, who were present) that an alcohol problem reduction policy that was based purely on price failed to address the principal causes of problem drinking,which were much more related to problems within the family than they were to the price of 'alcohol'.
The reason your pint of beer is more expensive than it should be is that the Treasury is entirely immune to reason on the subject of beer duty and, to use the Whitehall jargon, is totally 'captured' by the DoH agenda.
Sadly the logic behind the DoH agenda is also bollocks. It says, quite simply, "if you and everyone else you know had drunk less George Best would still be alive."
Let's put it another way, your pint is more expensive that it should be because the government believss that while you may be a decent bloke the cahp next to you who drinks one will have a chronic nut-type allergy.
Be afraid. The DoH is captured by zealots lost in shoddy thinking. Be very afraid. The Treasury believe want they.
