Successive British governments have, over the past decades, had a terrible addiction, an addiction to completely and utterly exterminating all forms of British industry. They have, in the main, been very successful. A snapshot of today's nation will showcase formerly prosperous, world-renowned, proud towns and cities savaged by the Government-lead massacre of manufacturing. Whole communities stabbed in the back when their jobs were pulled from under them and exported around the world. The people who defend these actions will call it an evolution from dirty industry and a lack of working standards to the slightly less class-focused society of tertiary progress. However, other civilised nations have shown you can have progress and workers rights while still having a meaningful engineering and manufacturing base. I'm looking at you Germany.
Britain on the whole still classes itself as a developed and rich nation, but under the financial services haven, propped up by blank cheques from the central bank, lies a country shedding jobs, masses of youth unemployment, fractured places without a sense of community or identity and declining living standards. Pretty picture it ain’t!
So what's all this got to do with a beer tax you might now be asking? Well there aren’t any more British car makers to break, no more industrial towns to force into wholesale unemployment without prospects and no more significant manufactures of machinery to extinguish, we have the second largest trade deficit in the world after all. The last viable, traditional but innovative, and successful industry left in Britain is the brewing industry and the Government has placed it firmly in their crosshairs. Like the famous fabled scorpion of frog stinging shame, they just can't help themselves.
The BBPA say that there are currently 20,000 people employed in the UK brewing industry, and that each person in the brewing industry generates 18 jobs in pubs, 1 job in agriculture, 1 job in the supply chain and 1 job in retail. This means that the UK brewing sector provides employment for 420,000 people. Such a large employer of British workers, and a high percentile of them young people, surely can't be a bad thing in such times of economic hardship? The government believe the opposite. The last two ruling Government's of the UK have raised tax on beer nearly 50% in five years! Yes you read that correctly, nearly a 50% rise. Is there any industry that wouldn't be pushed to braking point after such outright thievery?
Every sound minded person should be shocked to read that we pay more than TEN TIMES as much tax on beer as Germany and that Britons pay 40% of all the beer tax in the EU yet drink only 13% of the stuff. That's not the icing on the cake though, oh no, even the Treasury Department admit that each time beer tax has gone up, the revenue generated has gone down. It's actually costing money to be this extortionate!
We must not let any more people get thrown on the unemployment scrapheap. We must not let more community pubs become unviable for their owners or unaffordable for their patrons thus forcing the wise imbiber into lonely seclusion at home, and the unwise onto the streets with cheap supermarket swill, unchecked, instead of in the cosy safety of a local, charming inn where their peers can set a moral and healthy example. It's not just jobs and the economy at stake here you see, it's the very fabric of British society at risk. Successful prosperous communities exist because of the traditional British pub, not the local supermarket or a heaving Jobcentre Plus. The line must be drawn here. No further.
Sign this petition for starters, it's important, tell your friends, get them to sign it too.
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/29664
