A personal mile stone

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Tilting at WindmillsForgive the excessive number of navel gazing posts that this blog has indulged in of late, and allow me one more. This it seems is my 500th post – which given I started this back in 2011 just to post a write up of Old Holborns first little walk isn’t bad going. I really don’t seem to be able to break the post every 3 days average even if it is sporadic and involves days like today when I whitter on endlessly. Anyway to celebrate I’ve cracked open a bottle of my favourite home brew, a healthy little drop made with a third espresso and a dash of rum bringing it in at a respectable 10%, so do forgive me if this post decays towards the end and if any further posts tonight make no sense at all – but rest assured that apart from the rum no duty was paid on this beer and it cost way below 40p a unit.

If you’re reading this grab a dram and toast yourselves as even though you’re a very quiet bunch I know you’re out there and I like to imagine you’re a erudite and educated bunch sitting in leather armchairs in fine smoking jackets with a minimum wage lackey reading out my blog to you so you can chortle at my political window licking.

Sad to say nothing much seems to have improved out there over these 500 blog posts, and as many finer bloggers than I have observed and bemoaned we do seem to spend a lot of time saying the same things over, in my case normally a week or so after everyone else. I claim this is due to research and my hang up from having studied physics in wanting to reference things and provided citations (or links as the cool kids call them). To be upbeat there does seem to be more interest in the politics and the goings on of our lords and masters, but so far we do all seem to be muttering into our cups, still progress is progress. Whilst talking about progress I shall digress to ascribe my progress up the buzz feeds political rankings to them having closed registration and other blogs dropping off line, a shrinking pool does after all make all fish look bigger.

On the subject of progress and so that in another 500 posts time I can see how little I’ve made here’s what I’ve learnt from blogging so far:

  • A hell of a lot about common law and saying no thanks to Captain Ranty
  • That demo’s can be fun thanks to OH
  • How much even the petty powers that be will abuse the law to silence dissenting voices (Olly Cromwell)
  • More about model railways than since I was 14 thank to Leg Iron

More seriously:

  • It also turns out that I’m hopeless both at self publicity and publicity in general (see Drinkuary)
  • It’s easy to get people to join a campaign on Facebook and hit a “like” button but getting that to translate into visible action is a whole different ball game
  • Liking, sharing and other wise promoting posts anywhere is however important in itself
  • I shouldn’t whine about lack of comments when I rarely comment myself
  • Even actively invovled people are hopeless at providing feedback
  • This however doesn’t matter as I’ve still not found a windmill I won’t take a tilt at

So here’s to the next 500 posts, hopefully I’ll take less time to read them as with all that’s going on now more than ever the lone blog crying in the wilderness is vital to keep an eye on our glorious leaders, and I intend to carry on linking to other people that are doing that. So to help with that and the self publicity if you’re on Facebook and reading this do consider “liking” me I post far more links and random shite there as can be seen from the widget over to the side.

So to end the 500th post in a similar way to how the first one started I’ll note that Old Holborn is going for drinks in the Boot and Flogger tomorrow (Thursday 21st March) and I’ll be toddling along to that so maybe see some of you there.

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Drinkuary: Raining on the parade

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Raining on the parade This article was first posted on Drinkuary.

Rejoice be glad the beer duty escalator has stopped and beer duty has been dropped by a penny!! Big whoop and it’s not even true despite the headlines. I hate to be the one to rain on the parade but the Daily Mash has it right the Chancellor has bought you for a penny.

Let’s have a quick look at the parade before the rain clouds open:
“Success for the TaxPayers’ Alliance MashBeerTax campaign with the scrapping of the beer duty escalator and a 1p cut in beer duty” – Tax Payers Alliance
“The campaign is won! The escalator is scrapped and duty cut by 1p! Well done to everyone involved a triumph for CAMRA members!” – CAMRA
“”absolutely brilliant news. By cutting the tax on beer, he has moved to boost jobs in Britain’s pubs at a time when it is most needed.” – Brigid Simmonds, chief executive of the British Beer & Pub Association

I’ve seen quite a few other comments and tweets along the same lines, but now let us look towards those clouds on the horizons.
Real Ale Up north celebrates but at least notes:
“A whopping 42% increase in beer duty since 2008, resulting in a one pound coin of the realm now being trousered in tax, for every £3 pint you sup!”

But still that’s all past and we must be heading towards the sun surely? Well from the Pub Curmudgeon it’s good news bad news I’m afraid:
“Osborne’s changes have also ended the strict proportionality of the different rates of beer duty that existed before, as the escalator has continued to be applied to the 25% addition for High Strength Beer Duty, and the duty on beers of 2.8% or under has been cut by 6%, not just 2%, so it is now less than half the standard duty. I can’t see that doing much to increase their appeal, as we’ve seen already that a tax break alone cannot create a demand for something for which there wasn’t one before.”

So what we actually have here is yet another Government “nudge”, weaker beer has been made cheaper, normal strength beer they’ve stopped the escalator and taken a whole penny off the price, but strong beer over 7.5% is still on that escalator, as is cider, wine and spirits. So Cider drinkers CAMRA and the TPA don’t give a stuff about you, strong beer Drinkers as far as CAMRA and the TPA are concerned you don’t matter either their battle has been won! Oh and that value for “High Strength Beer” that’s set by statutory instrument and there were over 3,000 of those passed last year, so that bar can be quietly lowered with no fanfare whenever they like as they may not even be voted on.

It does though I’m afraid get worse. Once we’ve all finished rejoicing, taken down our campaign websites, packed up the banners and gone home the EU may come along and gently remind our Government that they can’t treat beer and wine differently, so they may have to re-instate that escalator again much more quietly. I suppose they good defy the EU or take wine off the escalator or some such, but do you really thing that terribly likely?

Whilst I’m raining on everyone’s parade let me also ruin the rejoicign that minimum pricing may be scrapped. First off lets just remember that may there, would it be beyond our Government to leak that it may be scrapped, that Cameron is isolated and that it’s all going to go away, let us all stop paying attention then introduce it anyway? Even if they don’t do that, lets say they drop minimum pricing “hoorah” we all say? Well not so fast I’m afraid says I, the drinks industry, TPA and CAMRA may all have based their campaigns on minimum pricing but not here. Here we want the puritans to leave us alone so we’ve not forgotten the other proposals in that draft “consultation” they still want:

Beyond that the usual suspects are suggesting plain packaging, larger health warnings and everything we’ve already seen happen to tobacco – so let’s not get too excited and complacent just because they may drop minimum pricing and have said they’ll take some beer off the escalator. If following all these excellent headlines the big campaign groups all pack up shop as they’ve “won” their campaigns I shall still be here doing what little I can about the rest of it, and if the rest of it comes to pass (possibly with tax rises to replace minimum pricing) well I told you so..

Just for the record, I’m not saying that CAMRA, TPA and Big Drinka and all the other blogegrs are going to pack up and go home, just well headlines like “we’ve won!” make me worry and campaigns focused at countering just a single line of attack would seem to leave the way open for the puritans to get everything else they want.

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What’s yours, is theirs

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Work and life having calmed down again for a little bit, there’s so much to catch up on, so with a bit of luck and a few pints expect a bit of a blog frenzy (may as well enjoy it whilst I can – but that’s for another post). The wheels continue to fall off the glorious EU project with Cyprus first saying they’re going to raid people savings, this turned out to be unpopular so their MPs voted against it, but despite that Cypriots are still limited in how much of their own cash they can with draw from ATMs and banks remain closed. Whilst they keep the banks closed the Cypriot government is discussing capital controls to stop everyone taking all their money out the moment they re-open, in the meantime people aren’t allowed to access enough money to continue to actually live a normal life or trade in any meaningful way. As other such as Snowolf have observed a very clear message has been sent to the rest of us – our money can be taken at a moments notice for “the greater good”, regardless of if Cyprus does pilfer it’s citizens savings I’d predict an awful lot of money will be leaving European banks, especially in Spain, Italy, Greece and rest just in case the pilfering spreads. If there’s any doubt that it might spread it’s worth noting that Spain is preparing the ground to follow the Cypriot example and have changed their laws so they can steal a moderate amount of money from peoples savings. Samizdata presents two alternative views which I’m not quite sure I agree with, confiscation of savings, like windfall taxes are different from 50p tax rates and aren’t a logical end point from tax systems as Cypriot style cash grabs represent a sudden change to the rules of the game. Taxes whilst still being theft of your property by the state are at least, meant to be, carried out according to announced rules which can be worked round and planned for. Likewise yes not bailing out the Cypriot banks would mean they failed and everyone would be out of pocket but that’s the risk we all allegedly take when we entrust our money to a bank, and letting banks fail would be the moral thing to do. Most Governments guarantee the small investors so it’d only be the “rich” that got hurt and once a few banks had failed and lost larger investors money I suspect we’d quickly see those investors paying a lot more attention to the probity of the banks and the emergence of sounder banks. Such winnowing of bad banks and encouraging investors to be as wary as any other purchaser is surely how free markets are meant to work and is how banks can be kept “honest”. Let banks fail, reintroduce consequence to the bankers and they might well start behaving.

Britain has nothing to feel smug about in this situation as we’ve been gradually stolen from by our Governments policy of printing money, though at least you can plan for that, and the last Government floated the idea of helping themselves to “dormant” accounts. The logical position to be in now is to have no savings, don’t count on a state pension and inest in things which don’t look valuable, mansion taxes make houses risky, history has seen seizures of gold from private citizens so any asset has to look worthless to escape the governments grasp. Which with one thing or another means that if MoneyWeek is to be believed means we’ll be royally screwed in due course.

One politician is sounding an ominous warning. Some have interpreted this as a euro-fan waving the horror of war to make everyone toe the line, predictably enough I disagree or at least I disagree with what to do about it. The economic conditions in Greece, Cyprus and elsewhere are due to the Eu and the Euro in particular and our lords and masters forcing us into a union which few on the streets wanted if fraying tempers. The EU hasn’t brought the economic prosperity and stability it promised and we’ve discovered we’re all crowded into a room full of people we don’t hugely like, the answer isn’t to move into an even smaller room but to say enough lets go our own way. Let the struggling countries leave, let tensions ease and after the required period of throwing blame around things may recover, further forced union may prevent a war between nations, but only because it’ll technically be a civil war between member states. I’m not seeing a huge advantage to that myself – except of course none of them will be able to afford to buy more bullets though they could always melt down euro coins.

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