Can he bodge it? Yes he can!

So it is budget day in the UK and Ozzy the Chancer has once more put a huge pile of extra tax on tobacco and booze. Except beer. He reduced the duty on beer by 1p.

As one commenter at the Daily Mail said – ‘Fantastic! It’s like Buy 300 and Get One Free!’

I can’t be bothered to link to any budget coverage because frankly, the economy of this country has less and less to do with me every day. Every newspaper is covering it, take your pick.

CAMRA have hailed the 1p-off price cut per pint as the salvation of the British pub because a really, really heavy and dedicated drinker might manage to save almost 20p on a night out, and that will make all the difference. Meanwhile the hatchet-faced filth of the Prohibitionist Medics Association have taken this 1p cut in duty to mean that the government has abandoned all plans to push forward their alcohol-free world. They have renewed their calls for a minimum price per unit that they can raise and raise until you’d have to sell your children for medical experiments in order to smell an empty whisky bottle.

The British Meddlesome Arseholes have wilfully ignored the price hikes on every form of booze but beer. Everything. Including strong lager. Only piss-weak flat warm ale is to get the 1p off. Everything else gets far, far more added on.

There are already illegal stills all over the place. There is worse: there was a recent capture of a gang who were de-colourising methylated spirits with bleach and selling it as vodka. The gangs don’t care if you dissolve from the neck down once they have your money. They know you’ll report them, therefore you’ll never see them again, therefore there is no point in them selling a quality product.

Ozzy just made that situation much worse.

He has increased his cut of tobacco sales in order to curb the sale of tobacco. What a load of crap. His budget is now more dependent than ever on that tobacco-duty income and the more he raises it, the more dependent he becomes. Once he has passed a critical point, assuming he didn’t just pass it, it will be cheaper for every single UK smoker to take a cruise with Smoking Hot than to take the bus to Tesco.

Coupled with an already booming illegal trade in dodgy tobacco, some of which isn’t even tobacco, which Ozzy has just made much worse, there will be a point where the tax take from smokers won’t just decline. It will simply stop.

You can already take a trip to the continent with Smoking Hot, pay your ferry fees and your share of the petrol and your hotel bills, have a day or two holiday, stock up with tobacco and you will have saved money! The price differential is now so great that it is actually cheaper to go all the way to another country to buy your smokes!

And that’s before the new price hikes. Ozzy just made that situation worse.

He scrapped the planned duty increase on petrol but hasn’t lowered it. You still pay around 70-80% of the price straight into the Government money drain every time you buy petrol.

He is increasing the tax allowance to £10,000 in a couple of years but has anyone noticed there has been no talk at all of raising it any further after that? It’s been going up a little bit every year for as long as I can remember. Now, in two steps, he’s capped it. Possibly forever.

I could survive on 10,000 a year at the moment. I’d need 12,000 a year to be able to afford regular doses of my luxuries – a bit more, now that he’s put up whisky prices again. In two years, £10,000 might just cover your annual heating bills but I wouldn’t want to bet on it.

As several newspaper commenters have pointed out, he seems to have bet the farm on eternally-rising house prices. Boom with no bust. I wonder where he got the idea?

So young people will be cajoled into buying houses with 95% mortgages and Ozzy will generously loan them money from their own taxes to start them off. He is not going to help with those heating and power bills though. Oh no, he’ll increase those until every house is a candle-lit ice box because every young family has to pour their minimum wage into paying off the mortgage. Once interest rates rise, repossessions will be rife and the banks will once again turn their imaginary money into real things.

A penny off beer duty isn’t going to get me back into the pubs. It wasn’t the price of beer that stopped my weekly (at least) pub visits but neither the government nor the drinks industry want to hear the real reason. As for CAMRA, they despise me as much as do ASH so I don’t care what they think. They aren’t ever going to see me in their pubs so they need not care what I think either. Sure, enjoy your 1p-off, CAMRA. Believe that it will bring us all flocking back to the pubs. Wait at the door to see the rush. Dodge the tumbleweed.

That duty cut is a farce. It will make no difference to the demise of the pub. You have to drink 100 pints to save £1 and then you’re a third of the way to the price of a pint. The only bigger joke of the day is that CAMRA hail it as a great victory.

Overall, my reaction to the budget is a shrug and a ‘meh’. It’s not going to save the country. It’s a bodge job to hide the cracks.

The only comfort I can take is that if Labour were in power, Ed Balls would have had a crowbar in those cracks to make them widen faster.