Im a binge drinker. Or so the government thinks so. The fact that I buy a bottle of wine, and consume it (usually in one evening), means that I am contributing to the breakdown in society and am going to go out and break shop windows and urinate on someone’s doorstep. To stop me from doing this, Mr Darling, our chancellor with the Thunderbirds eyebrows, decided to raise the duty at the last election by 14p, bringing the amount I contribute to the country every time I buy a bottle of wine to £1.45. This is apparently to make reckless people like me unable to buy alcohol, or at least as much of it, by making it prohibitively expensive. If I buy two bottles of wine each week, that is £150 every year I give to Darling. Make the not unreasonable assumption that there are another hundred thousand ‘excessive drinkers’ like me in the UK who buy a couple of bottle of wine to have over dinner each week, and that is fifteen million that we are giving to the chancellor every year. If that was being diverted into helping booze soaked wineys like me get off the dreaded sauce, that would be fine, but it isn’t, so, in the words of Baldrick, “I have a cunning plan” how to shaft the government.
Lets all buy older wine, where older, and therefore lower, duty rates have been paid. It might sound simple, but if we all bought, for example, wine that was released from bond a year ago, it would result in twenty eight thousand fewer pounds going into the country’s coffers thanks to me and my hundred thousand fellow booze hounds. If the wine was released 2 years ago, it figure would be another ten thousand on top. If we all start drinking late 90’s wines that were released at the turn of the century, that figure would be nearer £70,000.
I grant you, it means we have to sacrifice. We may have to drink fully mature wines, but it means we may drink a few less bottles each year as older wines tend to be a bit more expensive, but with a concentrated effort, we could do the government out of a hundred thousand pounds each year pretty easily. It would be a small victory for the wine lover, but it would be worth it. We get better wine and the government gets less cash from us – it is win-win!
This can even be a long-term movement. At two bottles each week, we would need to buy nine cases of wine to last us for a year. If we buy five years supply before the next budget, albeit at the new duty rate, any future duty increases will be kept from the government. And we don’t even have to buy higher priced clarets or Barolos. We could buy six pound Chilean wines, shiraz from Australia and cheapies from European countries. Stick these away for a few years, you can enjoy more mature wines, and screw the government out of some money.
For special occasions, instead of buying a recently released new world wine, search the internet for UK merchant with older wines. For the same price as a recent vintage iconic Australian, you can get a mid nineties wine and pay a duty rate set by Kenneth Clark – and we all know how much he liked his booze! In Clark’s last budget he not only froze duty on wine, but lowered it by 26 pence on spirits!
But before somebody shouts about the Tories being soft of alcohol abusers, and that the Labour party is fighting a just and noble cause, you have to remember that the drink of choice of ‘binge drinkers’ in the mid nineties was an alcopop, and Ken raised the duty on those in his last budget. Clark was also, the last chancellor to take up the option presented to the Chancellor of the Exchequer during the budget, as being the only person able to drink alcohol in the commons. Since then, it has been no booze for Brown and Darling and they have upped the duty on wine in every year they have been in power with only three exceptions.
So unless we get a reshuffle where we get a booze friendly MP in the post, we are stuck with this anti alcohol chancellor and his anti alcohol Prime Minister. So the campaign to screw Darling starts here….
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