No Jobs? No Economic Recovery? Let Them Have (Marginally Cheaper) Beer!
I've never heard of a "pint" before, but I hear the working classes like them.
What do you do when you're Chancellor of the Exchequer and everything's going wrong, possibly because of your policies, and you have to introduce a budget today full of evidence of failure? Do you abandon those policies in favor of something that might work and might not cause a triple-dip recession?
No. This is England. Give the plebs cheaper beer.
Chancellor George Osborne scrapped the country's above-inflation beer tax rises on Wednesday and cut one pence off a pint, cheering drinkers and providing some relief for a pub sector still enduring 18 closures a week….
"We will now scrap the beer duty escalator altogether, and instead of the 3 pence rise in beer duty tax planned for this year, I am cancelling it altogether," Osborne announced to big cheers in parliament.
"That's the freeze people have been campaigning for but I am going to take it one step further and I am going to cut beer duty by one pence. We are taking a penny off the pint."