Nanny State

Another intrusion.
In my opinion Supermarkets should never have been used to sell alcohol anyway. If the only place to buy beer was a pub or proper off licence maybe our pub and brewery trade wouldn't have been so decimated.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20515918

Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch.
SB you're killing me.
Pubs were so horribly smoky I was unable to enter them for twenty years whilst off-licences were, and no doubt are, so expensive that even I couldn't afford to get drunk in one. OK, I might not get the concept of an off-licence but I much prefer to buy good quality drinks, at a senible price, while I am doing my one stop shop.
If a supermarket chooses to reward my custom with the odd bargain then I am not going to refuse their generosity. There are just as many good deals to be had on food and clothing.
Why should I be denied such opportunities just because a few badly dressed people only go in for the booze offers and forget to buy food?

As to the decimation of the breweries, I can't be bothered to check, because as you know I don't care, but I feel sure that only the large breweries, who for many years dictated what sort of dishwater we were allowed to buy on draught in the seventies and early eighties (the whole era of my experience), were affected by a downturn in pub trade.
Microbreweries have multiplied enormously and have to produce quality ale that people enjoy due to the quality of the competition.

I shop in Dubai supermarkets and see absolutely no alcohol (or pork products, except at Spinneys) for sale. Not in any shops in fact. One has to have a licence to go to MMI, the only legal off-licence.
The price of drink at MMI is exactly the same as here but with barely any offers.
The price of a small bottled beer in the cheapest of hotel bars or licensed restaurants is £7 with a bottle of wine being over £30.
The national sport is getting drunk and at UAE wages all these prices are very affordable.

And finally, when unqualified people are legally prevented from carrying out their own version of skilled trade works then I might accept that only specialist outlets can legally sell alcohol.

You have a problem there VM, in that how do you define "skilled trade works" ? There once was such a linit in some areas and it resulted in newspaper workers aand others grossly abusing the system. At Cadburys the rlevent union man once insisted that scissoes could only be sharpened by one of their workers at an internal charge of , if I remember rightly £10 (and this would be around 1978 when £10 was £10)

Volty

Strange that pubs only started disappearing at a rate of knots when prices started to rise due to taxation and the smoking prohibition. As for qualified tradesman, certification doesn't mean a thing. I have seen more cowboy tradesmen with barrow loads of certification than I have ever seen gifted amateurs.

Gentlemen,

I don't care about pubs, I never really have. If they all closed tomorrow I wouldn't notice.
My point was that I don't buy my booze from pubs or outdoors. I buy it from supermarkets and SB was suggesting he didn't think that was a good thing.

As for the trade thing, it ain't gonna happen and I don't hanker after such a situation. I just used it as an example of how wide ranging the subject of specifying who can or can't sell something could be.
I am well aware of the elite group of over certificated idiots, I often have to tidy up after them. I have now stopped (educating) arguing with them, on the odd occasion our paths cross, because it is clear that whilst they only know the little they think they know, they think they know it all.
Again, I don't care. I used to but not anymore.

On the subject of taxation on booze, Dubai duty free, in the arrivals hall, insist that one buys four litres of Gin as one enters the country, non-muslims only of course, at a cost of 52 Dirhams per litre. That's £ 9.00 per litre. The Dubai duty free in departures sells it at 48 Dirhams.
Tesco can sell it for £15 and the RRP is about £23.

What makes me laugh is that I can take four litres into a country where it is more or less illegal to have it and can only bring one litre back to dear old blighty where we are awash with the stuff. Well I certainly am.

Someone is getting ripped off and it isn't all tax.

Volty

You say that somebody is being ripped off and it isn't all tax. the thing is "IT IS" nearly all tax, from what you can see below it seems that it pays to buy the more expensive brands, at least that way Mr Osborne gets his hands on less of your hard earned.

In the UK whisky is taxed twice: excise duty on the amount of alcohol in the whisky and VAT on the cost price (including the excise duty!).
On a standard size and strength bottle (70cl and 40%abv) with a retail price of £10 there is £7.51 excise duty plus £1.67 VAT totalling £9.18 (92% of the retail price). On the same bottle with a retail price of £30 there is still £7.51 excise duty but £5.00 VAT giving a total of £12.51 (42% of the retail price). A £100 bottle has just 24% tax, so the more you pay for your whisky the less tax you pay as a percentage.

#5 by Voltman , Today 5:54 pm
Gentlemen,

"I don't care about pubs, I never really have. If they all closed tomorrow I wouldn't notice.
My point was that I don't buy my booze from pubs or outdoors. I buy it from supermarkets and SB was suggesting he didn't think that was a good thing".

Volty my memory differs from yours somewhat, most of the time I saw you was in a hostelry, in fact I first met you in a pub when you taught me to drink.

Yes SB, almost correct.

Thanks for the breakdown Phil, there is a sort of logic to spending more but the tax man still wins either way, he gets income and / or corporation tax from everyone in the supply chain, so the more you spend the higher the profit margin the higher that tax.

It ought to be illegal to tax a tax, even if it is called "Duty"

Volty

Until I read this I had no idea that they could add V.A.T. to a tax, I suppose they though if we add it to the actual cost of a bottle of whisky .82p the amount would be only something like 15p therefore they would lose something like £1.52 a bottle. I'm wondering now if all high taxed items are treated the same. Anyway I always thought that V.A.T. was a tax on a service or goods supplied you would hardly describe excise duty as such.

Phil, you will probably know all this but for the benefit of the bewildered and because I might learn something.

Value Added Tax is a tax on the difference between the price paid for something and the price charged on for it.
The intention being that as it progresses toward the consumer and the value (price) of the item increases then the input tax is refunded and the (higher) output tax is handed over to the VAT man.
Thus he makes a few bob along the way as traders add value to the item and at the end of the trail he gets to keep it because the poor consumer doesn't get a refund.

To make sure Mr VAT gets his cut, if I buy something and then sell it on at the same price, although no value has been added I would have to A: Have my head examined. B: Declare output tax on the higher value I might reasonably have sold it for.
When I first got VAT registered I always thought the Added Value bit was to do with the fact that I would enhance the item by improving upon it and therefore make it more valuable.
I soon realised that Value and Valuable are not the same thing. One can buy something then sell it on at double the price and never even lift a finger. It's called drop shipping.

Volty

We were among the first companies to register for V.A.T. our registration number started with 111 those who know about these things will tell you that such numbers date from 1973. We didn't really want to but our accountant said we needed to because of the amount of our outgoings. Also our turnover exceeded the limit where you were required to register.

The thing is as I said previously it was introduced as a tax on services and goods and I never even suspected that it was also a tax on tax as well. I suppose though that I have never thought about before, but if I do I realise that if we charged V.A.T on our services we were then charging tax on the tax for fuel, land fill, and all the other hidden taxes. It hardly seems fair does it?

Oh dear Phil,
If you start adding up the tax, the duty and the tax on duty, it helps my theory that money has to change hands about 5 times before the chancellor has got it all off us.

On earnings it is about a thirty percent deduction.
Buy some petrol and he gets another 65% ( http://www.whatgas.com/car-finance/fuel-duty.html )
The petrol station gets taxed 30%ish on their profit.
That leaves about 17p of untaxed money for the next in line, which will be a bank who will take it all.

Volty

I've always realised that most of every pound we earn goes in tax of one sort or another and I've always thought that the actual pound was worth much less than 17p as you suggest. It's the idea of the government taxing tax that I had never thought of before and I just can't get my head around.