July Wine and Food-New UK Duty on Wine regime
It is August. We call it the silly season, but this year it is far more a time of despair.
Yesterday the government struck us with its revolutionary change in the way it collects duty on beer, wine and spirits. We have known about these plans for some time, but I suppose many of us had hoped, with galloping inflation, that they would not add to our problems by slapping whacking great imposts on our little comforters in the form of alcoholic drinks.
Sunak worked out this brilliant new scale when he was still Boris Johnson’s Chancellor and when our foreign policy was principally characterised by the desire to bait our close cousins in mainland Europe who have been shipping good wine to this country for more than a millennium.
