The Price of a Pint

I felt it was time this blog examined a lighter issue, one that causes me immense irritation. I came across an interesting statistic on the spectator website namely that the price of a pint will rise to 6.47 by 2012 if current trends in excise duty continue, on the same day I chanced upon the British Beer and Pub Associations response to the recent budget. It's key postion was 'the Chancellor's decision is bad for beer, bad for the public and bad for the Treasury'. The Governments main argument seems to be that increases in the excise duty on beer could help curb anti-social behaviour and underage drinking. As far as I can see this is a fallacy, portrays the governments naivity on the issue and is a postition that should be challenged. By increasing the price of a pint you are unlikely to have a major impact on those who perpetrate anti-social behaviour due to alcohol, as to put it quite simple those people are going to get drunk and disorderly by other means. The graph to the right shows an interesting phenomenon, as tax has increased on alcohol the sales of Beer have decreased while in contrast sales of drinks with higher alcoholic content have increased, this surely is not healthy.. Tom Clougherty also has a useful argument 'A group of kids sharing a bottle of vodka are hardly going to be deterred by having to split an extra 55p between them'. The real reason for these creeping taxes is as Jean Baptist Colbert put it "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing." In other words the government are extracting as much as they can from the silent majority who are extremely unlikely to protest on an issue like this, it is in effect a stealth text.

This is also a dangerous time to target our Beer industry when you consider the hardships it currently faces-
- The smoking bill- 1,409 pubs closed down in 2007
-Poor weather has increased the price of hops among other things.
-Tax amounts to 73 pence a pint while the total profits of Britain’s four biggest brewers fell to just 0.7 pence per pint.
-36 British breweries have closed in recent years, with the loss of around 2,000 jobs
-A further 44,000 beer supply chain jobs were lost between 2000 and 2005; all due to falling beer sales.
-Per unit alcohol Beer is on average the most expensive beverage- this is hardly fair as it is probably the least dangerous and is the most important to our economy
-British brewers have seen profits fall by 78%

Finally before I leave this open to our readers, i would like to state a few facts (taken from BBPA)-
-Beer is a homegrown product - 90% of beer drunk in the UK is made in the UK. In contrast, nearly all wine is imported, yet gets better tax treatment from the Treasury.
- The brewing and pub industry contributes over £28 billion to the UK economy
-Pubs employ over 600,000 people