Eventually people start dodging those taxes - and the results are dangerous:
Magistrates fined the owners of the BED club in the Grand Arcade (Gatecrasher Clubs and Bars Ltd) £5,000 with £2,095 costs after 656 litres of fake spirit were found on the premises in September last year, according to West Yorkshire Trading Standards Service (WYTSS).
It’s the biggest seizure yet of fake vodka by Trading Standards in West Yorkshire.
This is the consequence of government action - it makes such illegal arbitrage worth the risk. At £2 a shot that's over fifty grand. Or, in terms of tax avoided, it's about six grand.
The more we load onto duty, the more of this we'll see and the more we'll read of people poisoned by:
...isopropanol, tertiary butanol and chloroform, none of which should be in vodka.
Sadly this won't be the lesson from this event - the tip of an illegal spirits iceberg - our lords and masters will carry on piling the tax onto booze in the interests of "health". With the direct result being, at some point, blind, even dead nightclubbers.
H/T Leeds Citizen for the story
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1 comment:
But it's nothing new.
Back in the late 1960s in your own dear city of Bradford, I dated a girl of Polish origins whose father was a local 'wholesaler' of underground 'moonshine', illegally-distilled clear spirits, a product relished in most homes and clubs of the many Polish and Hungarian immigrants.
It could probably strip varnish at 20 paces, but it was certainly popular going by the stock-level in his cellar.
And yes, it was distilled in Bradford too - chances are the still's still stilling...... but I won't grass them up by telling where it was/is, she was a very fun girl, I owe her that much.
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