A pile of cost increases heaped on the pub industry next month by Rachel Reeves and the Labour Government will push the average price of a pint of beer above £5 for the first time, bosses have warned. The Telegraph has more.
The British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA) said a combination of higher taxes and increases in the minimum wage will mean the average cost of a pint of beer is to surge by 4.4%, rising faster than the current rate of inflation.
This means drinkers can expect to pay an average of £5.01 per pint in Britain compared with the current price of £4.80, it said, citing a survey by Frontier Economics.
In London, the average price of a pint hit £6.75 last year, according to a survey by the personal finance website Finder – meaning a similar 4.4% increase would see the price of some pints approach or even breach the £7 mark.
The soaring price of beer in Britain has been blamed on a string of cost increases heaped on brewers, pubs and drinks companies.
Bosses have warned about the inflationary impact of Rachel Reeves’s decision to increase employers’ National Insurance contributions (NICs) and lower the threshold for earnings at which they are paid from £9,100 to £5,000. At the same time, businesses face a 6.7% rise in the minimum wage.
Emma McClarkin, Chief Executive of the BBPA, said: “The cumulative impact of these taxes and regulations is now plain to see and it is highly unfortunate that the only way many pubs can remain viable is to pass on the array of upcoming costs to consumers.
“No one wants to see the cost of an average pint increase by a further 21p and break the £5 average pint barrier that will be required for pubs to maintain their punishingly slim profit margins.”
Because hospitality companies often rely on lower-paid and part-time staff, chiefs have accused the Chancellor of disproportionately hammering pubs and restaurants compared to other industries by moving the threshold for NICs. …
In total, the BBPA said the impact of new costs from Ms Reeves’s October budget alone would amount to a hit of approximately £650 million for the beer and pub industry.
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“‘Left on the economy and Right on culture’.”
What is ‘new’ about that? It’s what we have had since Labour’s victory in 1945 introducing a ‘Mixed Economy’ of private and nationalised businesses sitting aside traditional working class social conservatism.
Subsequent so-called Conservative Parties adopted this model until Thatcher denationalised State run businesses, but kept the rest.
Post-Thatcher the Conservatives followed in Blair’s footsteps, moving away from social conservatism towards the Left and following World-saviour Brown’s return to economic socialism.
Putting neo- and social in front of words is just distraction – and not very original.
Excellent analysis. Ostensible Conservatives like Cameron, May, Johnson, and Sunal are liars and/or fools for believing the big state can be a force for good.
Unfortunately, politics attracts the arrogant and the narcissistic who are forever looking to expand their realm. It seems to be nigh on impossible to confine the activities of the state to its core functions only. Even the USA, with its constitution which explicitly limits the scope of the federal government, has seen the federal government continue to expand in open defiance of the constitution. Perhaps Swiss style radical decentralisation and direct(ish) democracy has the greatest ability to contain the state.
I don’t particularly have an issue with schools teaching children to clean their teeth regularly and properly. It’s not much different conceptually from giving them daily milk at school, which used to happen when I was a kid.
It’s all the other evil nonsense I object to – teaching them there are seventy-something genders, sex is a social construct, the government is on their side, etc.
I had ‘compulsory milk’ at school too. It was originally put in place for kids who were genuinely malnourished. The problem with this program of teaching kids is that you are also teaching parents that government absolves them of their responsibility for child raising (as if enough damage hadn’t been done already).
I think protectionism can be overused, used for the wrong reasons and may often be the wrong thing, but I find the idea of a very self-sufficient country very appealing – it gives you more ability to go your own way, which would hopefully the “way” the people want to go.
Found this quite interesting but genuinely confused – I thought the battleground in UK politics was to appear right wing on economics and on the left socially?
“It is that which governs” – or jobs for the boys, in effect. What organisation would want to cut back on it’s rôle in business? While there are many benefits from international standards, as distinct from commercial anarchy, in most industries, it’s also true that most institutions, whether in or outside political government, tend to operate defensively.
Traditionally, conservatives were monarchists and monarchical states of the past, which controlled, among other things, public transport as well as public communication and tightly regulated a real lot of things in the economy, were anything but small by standards of today.
In Germany, Bismarck introduced universal health insurance towards the end of the 19th century but nobody demanded that the state must oversee the private hygenie of the children of ordinary people because this would save the health insurance money. In fact, even the NHS has existed for over 70 years without someone coming with this idea. It probably even existed for longer without aggressive campaigns against smoking and drinking than with it. Our modern would-be tyrants want to rule tyrannically because they would really like to be tyrants. There’s no law of nature which forces them to, it’s all down to allowing the wrong kind of people access to levers of power and let them dig in there since the advent of Cool Britannia, if someone (hopefully) remembers the slogan.
The solution to this problem is to get them out of there and not
let the semi-undead neoliberal Shreeenk the stateee! zombies fire-sell whatever baths they can still find somewhere and throw the bathing babies into the bin.
The argument seems to be that there is no centre ground in politics. We are either extreme Left (the state rules in everything) or extreme Right (close to anarchy). Well I occupy the centre ground and always have. I believe in well funded public services and I am prepared to pay more tax to fund them. But when it comes to the prevention of disease the state should never instruct but it must advise.
Starmer may well desire to instruct the nation’s children to clean their teeth, but he would be well advised not to try. Instead I would suggest that the author of this piece and Starmer study the “back to sleep campaign” which ran between 1990 and 1995 and led to the fall in the number of deaths from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) in England and Wales from around 1500 per annum in 1985 to 500 per annum in 1995. The standard teaching in the early 1980s was to put infants to sleep on their fronts. The evidence was that there was better oxygenation in the prone position and the infant would be less likely to inhale vomit. This fact was rediscovered in the Covid pandemic when patients in ITU were placed prone to improve the oxygenation of the blood. Peter Fleming and colleagues published a paper in the BMJ in 1990 which pointed out that the prone position seemed to be asscoiated with increased risk of SIDS and reviewed a number of other papers which had found the same thing. There was a lot of publicity about this paper and midwives and health visitors started to advise parents to put their infants to sleep on their backs (supine). This occured without any government intervention. Ann Diamond, a well known TV presenter, who had lost her infant to SIDS, led a media campaign but there was no offical campaign. I attended a meeting in Peterhouse College in Cambridge the day after black Wednesday (1992), run by the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths (FSID). There was discussion about a national campaign, although deaths had already fallen quite markedly. There was actually one voice (who will remain nameless) who wanted a randomised trial. But everybody else agreed to support the “Back to Sleep” campaign. It was a great success. But the key point was that there was good medical advice and parents were keen to follow it.
The majority of people in the UK, those on and around the median wage, want good public services, want their children to be able to buy a house, want to stay healthy and don’t mind paying taxes. They are not interested in GDP, but they do want employment and do not like rising prices. Those with a white skin do not want to be told that they should be ashamed of their heritage. They do not want the state to tell them what to do but they do not object to sound advise based on good scientific evidence. Best summed up as slighltly to the left on the economy and slightly to the right on matters cultural.
I brush your child’s teeth, therefore I, the State, exist. I, the State, exist in the brushing of your child’s teeth.
What happens when the parental state becomes a neglectful parent? Shall we ask the girl children of Rotherham? And in other places and circumstances?
Mr Starmer might as well go the whole hog. Given how ‘neglectful’ parents are, how does the parental state know what horrors are in the child’s lunchbox? How can the state exist and ensure children’s health unless teachers wipe someone else’s child’s @rse?
To paraphrase an Hungarian revolutionary: Who will free us from Government?
What is this ‘drain on the state’s resources’ that Starmer talks about?
If the state doesn’t exist apart from what is does, it’s resources are only the things or people in which it acts. The state’s presence is never latent. The state is therefore everywhere it acts. It’s resources are only limited by the number of things in which it has not yet acted.
As God’s grace or the Holy Spirit is for Christians, just so the invisible state. As with the ‘wind of the Spirit’ you hear the sound of it but know know not whence it comes of wither it goes, so with the spirit of the state: you feel its presence but know not its beginning or end. The Almighty God-State. Eternal, immortal, invisible, only wise; dwelling in unapproachable light of unchallengeable goodness and infallible righteousness; without shadow of change, though changing everything else
Has to be mentioned here as well: The purpose of a health system is to repair health problems and not to prevent them. There’s a very simple reason for this: The first is a tangible objective which can – within certain limits – be accomplished. The second isn’t as it’s impossible to determine how many health problems some action XY really prevented. That’s all guesswork based on inherently unverifiable opinions. This implies its also impossible to quantify the cost-effectiveness of health problem prevention as only the cost of the measures is known but not the savings indirectly caused by them.
Some people are very convinced that total abstinence will prevent lots of health problems. Some other people are equally convinced that praying to some god will accomplish this. Neither of both is verifiable, so, let both of them preach to the unconverted in order to convert them. Neither the former nor the latter lifestyle pressure group ought to be allowed to use the power of the state to force people into their creed, no matter how convinced they are of it.
How does your statement on health problems fit with my description of sudden infant death syndrome (above).? There is a possibility of preventing SIDS, but no way of repairing it.
The “back to sleep” campaign was a great success because parents quickly took to what they considered to be sensible advice; and advice that was consistent with their instincts. The government had no direct role but the NHS supported it.
The Labour party are making a lot of promises on prevention which involve putting a lot more pressure on the NHS and will be counter-productive. In fact most of their so called prevention is actually early detection of disease, which is very expensive, because we always find much more potential disease then would ever materialise.
The Conservative party must not make the mistake of being against primary prevention, they just need to be against the way Labour approaches prevention.
I wish someone in the Conservative Party would grasp the concept of the mucosal tissue microbiota, because then it would be obvious how to reduce the burden of disease within the UK.
https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2821/rr
How does your statement on health problems fit with my description of sudden infant death syndrome (above).?
Well, nobody knows how many people, if any, took this advice, nobdoy knows how SIDS would have developed without it, nobody knows the reason why the toddlers who didn’t die suddenly didn’t die and lastly, taking everything for granted, the effect of the campaign (at which cost?) was that a numerically unremarkable event remained numerically unremarkable. That’s classic public health voodoo and somehow, people in earlier times used to have more healthy children under ecomically worse circumstances entirely without it. If people want to proselytize in favour of proper sleeping positions for toddlers because nature just cannot be trusted, that’s fine. But they shouldn’t even have the right molest anybody with this who doesn’t want to be bothered with it, let alone go beyond that.
The PFKAL¹ is still chock-full of academic New Age lifestyle religion zealots and public health and/ or NHS money spent on something useful (like pulling broken teeth) and not on their preferred pet causes is still the argument to force their weird creeds onto everyone. That’s obviously counter-productive to anyone except these people themselves who are probably motivated by a combination of simply lusting for the money in the NHS budget and a desire to affirm the correctness of their beliefs by forcing others to bow to them.
¹ Party Formerly Known As Labour, that is, until Tony ‘Call me Messiah!’ Blair killed the actual Labour party.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/labours-bold-mission-today-brushing-teeth-tomorrow-tying-shoe-laces/
TCW’s view of the ground-breaking ‘how to brush your teeth’ initiative announced by Kneel.
Funny. But the Labour policy actually isn’t. It’s another demonstration that the lifestyle dictators adhering to a zoo of worldly New Age religions aren’t willing to let anything slip past them, no matter how small. The problem with these people is that they’re convinced that there’s a single right way to do everything, that they’re the ones with higher insight enabling them to determine what that single right way is and that they’re entitled to enforce it because they’re the ones with the higher insight, ie, demigods (at least) and not just mere fallible people.
These people would love to prescribe things down to the colour and kind of bed linen others must use and would certainly also love to operate CCTV in every toilet to ensure that everyone uses them properly.
I wish this was a bette text than what I can accomplish in this area …
Another muricanism from the All the world is murica! muricans. The battle – it’s not really appropriate to call this a battle – is not between the Everything is political! and the Nothing is political! aka Taxation is robbery! people as these are just two sides of the same coin: People whose understanding of the world is binary, ie, who are convinced that there are always exactly two choices and that one of them is always right and the other always wrong. Both kinds should be firmly kept in their playpens as both are equally dictatorical. Standpoint A could be described as Every child must be forced into a comprehensive public school! and B as Teaching future McDonald’s Burger grill operators to read is a waste of public money! In both situations, common people have no choices.
The ones who started the nannying are now reaping what they sowed:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/jonas-himmelstrand-the-swedish-daycare-experiment-has-been-a-social-disaster-2/
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/swedish-parents-have-lost-trust-in-themselves-under-the-daycare-assault/