There have been mutterings about a tax on food. It's a breathtakingly stupid idea, so it'll probably be adopted by this government.
Or maybe they'll say 'Nah, only joking. We'll put VAT on books instead'. Imagine the relief. Food is essential. For me, so are books, but these days the younger generation don't bother much with books. There would be outrage at the idea of a tax on food but if the government then shifts it to books, much more than half the country will say 'Okay. You can do that as long as you don't do it on food.'
A trade-off. For now.
Once there is a tax on books it can be made variable and complex. Our government like variable and complex where tax is concerned because very few people can work out what's going on. Then the tax can be made very low on approved books and very high on non-approved ones.
They would dearly love a tax on food, of course. Again, once the variable and complex aspects are applied, non-approved foods can be priced out of reach and bland stock-feed is all the masses will be able to afford. The pelleted feeds now given to pigs should work just as well for humans, you know.
I don't think there will be a tax on food just yet. It's a scare tactic designed to make us all feel relieved when that tax is deflected onto something else. Like the £8-a-bottle duty hike for spirits, which we will all be grateful to find is actually only £5 a bottle. There's going to be a tax hike on something but it's not food. Books and magazines would be high on my guess list. Perhaps books first - after all, there'd be much less fuss about a tax on the works of Shakespeare than a tax on Heat or Cosmo.
The food tax will be back. Once the idea of food tax is in the public's mind, especially if it's reinforced over a few budgets and deflected each time, then when it finally comes into force it won't meet much resistance. People will have grown accustomed to the idea.
The Righteous play a long game.
6 comments:
although you cannot beat the feel of the book in your hands and a quiet read without advertisements. if they tax books then i will simply download them. or i can just stay out of the uk forever more and say f**k you! you have ruined my country and to think i fought for you and was once proud to be british! now i find myself cringing at the way foreigners laugh at our "elected" and country as a whole. WHAT IS THE ANSWER LEG IRON" i cannot see one.
There is a tax on food, dog and cat food that is. Prepared food for our pets has 17.5% VAT on it.
It will come, with high saturated fat and salty foods to start with, and then others according to how bad for you they are deemed to be. Driven by a healthcare Nazi agenda. You would think that these people consider us to be immortal and need to be protected from buggering our health up. Unfortunately we all die. I would rather die having eaten a chip butty than a lettuce leaf. Bastards!
<a href="http://simbits.blogspot.com/2010/03/tax-on-learning.html>knowledge is power, don't tax it</a>
What NuLab actually said was that there are categorically no plans for the current chancellor to bring in such a tax.
As ever, spot the weasel words. They forgot to point out that the "current" chancellor only has two more months in the job. I guess even if the badger is re-appointed (unlikely, but not impossible), they'll claim it's a different chancellorship or something.
Either way, their denial meant "Yes, but not till after the election".
Goes for quite a few things, probably.
Chalcedon: “There is a tax on food, dog and cat food that is. Prepared food for our pets has 17.5% VAT on it.”
Ah, but our greedy lot don’t get their hands on that, do they? VAT is an entirely EU tax and goes straight into the EU coffers, not our Government’s. I’m guessing that any “new” tax on foodstuffs (or pretty much anything else for that matter) will be a big grab by “our” politicians to make up for the fact that at the moment they’re getting nothing. Aw, shame!
I suppose I'll have to dig over that last patch of lawn in the spring.
I'll need all the growing space. Then I'll have to evict those goldfish and put in something edible.
Frogs, maybe. Not trout. They'll just get stolen.
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