Thieving son of a goat...

A number of blogs have been carrying banners for Axe The Beer Tax, and for good reason. If you weren't aware (and I imagine that's more than a few of you out there), 33% of the cost of a pint is tax. A THIRD. Buy three pints, and one of those was pure tax.

Not that the politicians are too worried about that.

What makes that even more hard to swallow is the other duties we pay on alcohol. As of the PBR, £1.57 of a bottle of wine in the UK is duty. That means that horrific bottle of plonk you picked up for £3.50 in the supermarket contains less than £1.93 of wine. That's before you count the costs of shipping and bottling. Spirits? On a bottle of, well, let's say Smirnoff (oddly enough, my text recognition software on my phone reads that as Poison before I get to the ff) at 37.5%, that's £6.03. Given that one can pick up a bottle of the stuff for about £15, that's about 40%.

And they think they need new laws to dissuade us from drinking?