The rate is too low to have any significant impact. Look how cheap unbranded spirits are in supermarkets; adding 40p to an eleven quid bottle of vodka is hardly a deterrent. To have a meaningful impact you would need to double the price. (Or legislate to stop shops selling at low prices).
Or sell it behind the counter, behind closed doors, and have no branding on the bottles apart from pictures of @askewshair taken late on any Friday night...
It will You will find A&E quieter, be able to more easily get appointments at your GP, and see less antisocial behaviour. Presumably...otherwise it will have been a failure
But only Sweden and Finland have a higher tax rate on alcohol, Spain Portugal el al, have tiny tax rates compared to ours, this is nothing to do with health it’s another way of raising millions of pounds without an outcry, dressing it up as a health issue, and reduce the strength of a beer will only make people drink more to get the same effect, so it’s bollocks isn’t it.
But it helps move money away from poorer people to the Treasury and richer people with shares in drinks companies (because you can bet your life the price rises will be a bit bigger than the taxes) This is clearly seen as a good thing by many voters
It will add about £1 to supermarket spirits and 44p to a bottle of wine (the pub guarantee means bigger increases in supermarkets than pubs), but as you say, it's not an enormous change (though a similar increase in Scotland did see a 7.5% drop in sales, particularly in heavy drinking households, so hopefully it will have some impact).
When I worked at a government establishment, we had a 50 gallon drum of 96% drinkable alcohol. Customs came once a year to look us over and got quite excited one time when 5 gallons were missing. We told them we had had a leak, which was true, after drinking it in various diluted concoctions. Management insisted that, in future, we complete the required paperwork for acquiring said alcohol (regardless of how it was used/consumed).
I would go to Finland quite a lot The beer prices were high but the beer was strong People would ask for water to drink in between beers so they didnt get drunk The charge for water was the same as it was for beer
I spent most of my adult life thinking that drugs should be decriminalised - own body, own decisions, full autonomy of self reasons. This was until I've seen that governments just expect the rest of the population to accept, tolerate and carry the burden of the social fall-out from these decisions - crime, street decay, social problems, destroyed families, mental illness etc I've been to three cities in the last few years - London, new York and San Francisco, where personal drug use is pretty much accepted, even in public, and the social decline as a result of this decision is obvious.
I see Jarvo the Goolie was on BBC Look North earlier discussing the Goole water towers. Full marks to him for getting them the right way round. The views expressed in my posts are not necessarily mine.
