The one good thing about the bit of freelance advertising work I did recently was the opportunity to get my hands dirty in some interesting data. Research company NVision always pull together numbers in a really interesting way and make some powerful observations – such as this one:
Over the last thirty years, beer duty has increased almost fourfold. It has increased far, far more than duty on wine or spirits.
Perversely, the less alcoholic a drink is, the more it gets taxed.
Proof that successive governments of any party are biased against beer.
They see duty purely as source of revenue. Taxation policy has nothing to do whatsoever with trying to curb binge drinking.
And alcohol taxes are regressive – this is an oversimplification, but what’s undeniable here is that poorer people over time pay a constantly increasing proportion of total alcohol taxation.
