Tax and morals

Business Secretary Vince Cable yesterday rounded on the "appalling abuse" of the UK's tax system by multinationals operating here.

Last week, Margaret Hodge, chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, described Amazon, Google and Starbucks as "immoral" for chanelling their profits to low or no tax countries via spurious licensing fees, allowing them to claim that they make a loss here year in year out.

Cable and Hodge are and have been members of governments that have overlooked and even encouraged this activity, hailing chief executives as "wealth creators" while cutting the number of tax inspectors. They even subsidide these companies with public money by topping up their low-paid workers' wages with tax credits. Looked at from the perspective of the companies themselves, you've got to ask why they would voluntarily pay tax when politicians don't expect them to and the Revenue isn't chasing them for it, preferring to enter into agreements with them about how much they can fiddle. Morally, they are no different to the poacher told by the estate manager that he's laid off the gamekeeper and he can help himself to the grouse as long as he doesn't overdo it.

The idea that if these companies paid tax  the government wouldn't have to cut public services - and protests organised against them on that basis by UK Uncut - is also off-beam. That the government's drive to cut and privatise public services is an ideological one rather than forced on them by a lack of money is underlined by their intention to spend £20 billion replacing the Trident nuclear missile system over the next decade.

Going down?

The House of Commons yesterday debated a subject close to the hearts of MP's, and indeed mine: the price of beer.

The beer duty escalator introduced by the Chancellor Alistair Darling in 2008 means that the duty on beer increases every year by two per cent above the rate of inflation. Along with 104,000 others, I signed the CAMRA e-petition that triggered the backbench debate, introduced appropriately by the MP for the brewing town of Burton-on-Trent.

I'm not sure how many MP's normally turn up for these debates but there were quite a few there yesterday, all of them - Tory, Labour and Lib Dem - calling on the Government to scrap the escalator. It makes you wonder who voted for it in the first place.

I'm in favour of scrapping the escalator - and ultimately beer duty and other indirect taxes - but there seems to be an assumption that the beer escalator is the reason pubs are closing and scrapping it would cut the price of a pint.

There are lots of reasons pubs close and lots of factors pushing up the price of beer: VAT, rises in the cost of raw materials and transport and the rents pub companies charge their tenants. I'm not sure how scrapping the escalator would reduce the price of a pint, as opposed to giving brewers a bit of breathing space and possibly holding back further increases. given that most breweries would surely just pocket the money they saved in duty rather than pass on the benefit to their tenants and drinkers.

Back to 1914

The Government has announced that it is spending £50 million to mark the centenary of the First World War in 2014.

There are proposals to shut shops and cancel sporting fixtures on the day itself. I've got another idea. In 1914, the average original gravity of English beer was around 1050º (compared to around 1030º now) and the average price of a pint was threepence, equivalent to about £1 now. The Chancellor should suspend the duty on beer brewed for that day so that pubs can sell it at 1914 prices. If he doesn't, I suppose it'll have to be Wetherspoons with CAMRA vouchers for a pre-WWI priced pint.

Tories and the tax on beer

The Guardian has interviewed people attending the Tory conference, including the chief executive of the British Beer and Pub Association (formerly the Brewers' Society) who, while there in a professional capacity, also supports the party personally.

It's hardly surprising that most brewers, like most business owners, are Tories. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, brewers who became Tory politicians, known as the "beerage", included the Allsopps, owners of the one of the biggest breweries in Burton-upon-Trent.

More than three hundred MP's are members of the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group which exists to "promote the wholesomeness and enjoyment of beer and the unique role of the pub in UK society". Why then do they do so little to stop the pocket of the drinker being raided by the Chancellor in successive Budgets?

Close the Coalhouse door

I listened to the Radio 4 play Close the Coalhouse Door by Alan Plater on Saturday afternoon.

Based on the writings of ex-miner Sid Chaplin, Close the Coalhouse Door is about the Durham miners' union from the strikes to achieve recognition in the 1830's through the Depression and post-war nationalisation.  It's also well known for the songs in it by Alex Glasgow which as well as Close the Coalhouse Door include As Soon As This Pub Closes and Socialist ABC.

Alan Plater wrote the play in 1968, before the coalfield battles of 1972, 1974 and 1984-5, so director Sam West brings the play up to the present day with an "alternate history" in which Thatcherism never happened. If only...

Brewing at the White House

The US presidential election has taken another twist with news that Barack Obama is brewing at the White House. The president's chefs have brewed a brown ale, a blond ale and a porter with honey from the White House's beehives.

There's been speculation as to whether this is the first beer ever brewed in the White House. Although Thomas Jefferson is known to have been a homebrewer, there are no records of him brewing in the White House itself.

Even though Prohibition ended in 1933, the ban on hombrewing wasn't repealed until 1978 when Obama's Democratic predecessor Jimmy Carter approved legislation allowing beer to be made at home.

So Americans, who's it to be in November? Teetotaller Mitt or brewer Barack?

Hillsborough, truth and justice

I'm glad that the lies of the police, politicians and press about the 1989 Hillsborough disaster have been thoroughly exposed by the independent panel examining documents relating to that day, especially for the relatives of those killed whose long fight for the truth has now been publicly vindicated. But the apology made by David Cameron in the House of Commons yesterday struck me as hollow and cheap. And twenty-three years too late.

Will anyone responsible for what happened at Hillsborough in 1989 or the cover-up in the years since then be held to account for what they did? The policemen whose incompetence was the main cause of the disaster who then smeared the dead as drunken hooligans? The politicians - including the local Tory MP and the Prime Minister - who helped spread what they knew were lies in order to protect the reputation of the police? The newspaper editor who published the lies? The coroner who accepted without question the police's evidence and dismissed that of other witnesses such as fans?

I fear that Hillsborough will join a long list of incidents - Bloody Sunday, Bradford, Heysel, Zeebrugge - where even though the truth of what happened is known those responsible will ultimately escape justice.

Another ban on booze

A report by the House of Commons Health Select Committee argues that "serious consideration" should be given to banning alcohol advertising and the sponsorship of sporting events by drinks companies who it accuses of claiming "that advertising messages have no effect on public attitudes to alcohol or on consumption."

This is the same flawed logic that led to the ban on tobacco advertising. No one starts smoking or drinking because of an advert on TV or because a football team or Test side is sponsored by a brewery. The point of advertising is to create brand awareness/loyalty among people already buying or about to start buying your product rather than to stimulate consumption across the industry. The idea that banning the advertising of alcohol or the sponsorship of sport by alcohol companies will stop people drinking is as ludicrous as the idea that the ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship has had any impact on the number of people who smoke.

Ain't that good news?

Imagine you went to the factory where you worked one day and the boss told you that it might be closing. You'd be understandbly concerned. If, after a few months of uncertainty, the boss told you that it wouldn't be closing but he'd be cutting your pay and other conditions, you might be relieved to still have a job but hardly feel like cracking open the champagne.

That's exactly what's happened at the Vauxhall car plant in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire. But politicians from all the main parties have been falling over themselves to hail the decision by General Motors to build its new Astra there in return fot the workers and their union Unite agreeing to a four year pay deal, starting with a two year pay freeze, and more "flexibility" over shift patterns and other conditions as a "victory for Britain".

The other factory in the running to build the new Astra was the Opel plant in Bochum, Germany, now threatened with closure. Presumably the workers there weren't cheap or "flexible" enough. Clearly General Motors had already decided to close a factory in Europe and used the opportunity to play off British and German workers and cut the pay and conditions at the one that they kept open. I'm sure they'd claim that it was necessary to do so in order to keep the factory open but I doubt very much that GM's top executives or shareholders are taking cuts to their pay or dividends.

All this underlines the need for trade union co-operation and solidarity across Europe. Imagine what would have happened if the workers in Britain and Germany had told GM that they weren't prepared to swap their pay and conditions for their jobs and would strike if it shut either factory.

The price of beer (again)

The Scottish Government yesterday introduced a minimum price for alcohol of fifty pence per unit, equivalent to a pound for a pint of ordinary strength beer. As we all know, the actual price of a pint is between two and four times that depending on where you are drinking.

The Scottish Government claims that minimum pricing will help tackle the country's alcoholism problem but I just can't see it working out like that. Poor people who have a drink problem will scrape together the extra cash somehow for cider and fortified wine and better off alcoholics won't even notice because the wine and spirits they drink are unlikely to be affected anyway.

You could of course argue that the UK Government is already using minimum pricing by placing a high level of tax and duty on alcohol. And if we can have minimum prices, why can't we have maximum prices too, say twice the mimimum. That would work out at two pounds a pint, about what it should be if you take off the tax and duty.

On tax and alcohol duty, the Goverment line seems to have changed. New Labour ministers claimed ridculously that raising it was the only way to stop binge drinking. Now, according to the Treasury, alcohol duty has to go up to help cut the deficit. So the message to patriotic Britons is clear: drink more beer!

Mild life

An item on the local news caught my eye this morning.

Ninety-four year old Fred Dell from Fleetwood has been popping into the Strawberry Gardens pub for a "swift half of mild" since he was 18 in 1936. The landlord has now said he can drink there for free.

Dell's comment that when he started drinking there "You could get half a mild, five Woodbines and a box of matches and a penny change for half a sixpence." reminded me of what an old man in a pub says to Winston Smith in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: "When I was a young man, mild beer - wallop, we used to call it - was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course."

Free beer for the rest of your life when you're 94 is a small reward for seventy-six years drinking. The pub itself has seen some changes in that time if these reviews are to be believed, seemingly for the better. And contrary to what successive health ministers and Chancellors have told us, Dell's longevity proves that BEER IS GOOD FOR YOU.

That horse and another gate

One of my favourite films is All the President's Men, based on the book by Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. It tells the story of their investigation into the Watergate break-in and the subsequent resignation of President Richard Nixon to avoid impeachment. 

Subsequent political scandals have since acquired the suffix -gate and the phone hacking scandal at News International is no different.  The revelation that David Cameron rode an ex-Metropolitan Police horse belonging to his friend, ex-Eton classmate and now racing trainer Charlie Brooks and his wife,  former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks - both of whom were arrested and released on police bail yesterday - summed up the corrupt connections between the police, politicians and News International and has led to the affair being dubbed Horsegate.

Surely a film will eventually be made about the phone hacking hacking scandal but who could possibly play the main characters?  Richard E Grant as Cameron? Dustin Hoffman as Nick Davies of The Guardian? I'm struggling with Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks to be honest.

Politicians and beer

When politicians are photographed drinking or pulling a pint, the motive is normally to appear "of the people" and attract votes. None of the charlatans above actually enjoy drinking beer as far as I know: Blair as PM drank whisky, Johnson as an ex-member of the Bullingdon Club is surely a champagne drinker and Livingstone in an interview last year admitted that his enthusiasm has shifted over the years from Newcastle Brown Ale to wine.

With the ex-Czech president Václav Havel who died yesterday, it was surely different.  While he doubtless benefitted from a beer drinking image given the Czech Republic has the world's highest per capita beer consumption, like politicians across the border in Bavaria I'd guess he actually liked the stuff too. 

The right-wing Labour chancellor of the 70's Denis Healey once criticised Margaret Thatcher for having no hinterland, that is interests outside politics (his were opera and photography).  Václav Havel's hinterland was pretty extensive, encompassing beer, politics, drama and poetry.  One of the most famous photos of him was taken in 1994 by Jiri Juru in the Prague pub U Zlatého Tygra, alongside the US President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and fellow writer and regular Bohumil Hrabal.
















h/t to White Beer Travels for reproducing the photo.