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[/audioplayer]If George Osborne was ever a conservative he dropped the pretence today. The chancellor sounded risibly pompous as he declared his plan to impose a slimming regime on Britain’s heaving population of wobble-bottoms. A levy on fizzy pop will arrive in 2018. Even before he’d explained the rationale behind his Weightwatcher’s initiative he’d sabotaged it by exempting ‘milk-based drinks’. But a tax on pop already carries innumerable loop-holes in the form of doughnuts, choccie bicccies, Jammy Dodgers and cream puffs. The intellectual basis of this self-congratulatory exercise is the assumption that Britain’s much-maligned chubsters are a) too dim to add up or b) too lazy to waddle from the beverage display to the cake counter. It’s very unfair on the fat who more than pull their weight in their support of British agriculture.
The barley-water tax will have two bands which means that many thousands of pen-pushers and sugar-tasters will be needed to administer it.
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