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Cricko

Zone Owner⭐⭐
Staff member
Joined
Oct 25, 2006
Messages
38,494
Location
Leigh-On-Sea
[h=1]Taxing Festive Cheer - a new low[/h]I do hope you all enjoyed the festivities over Christmas. Perhaps, like I, you drank a fine wine with friends, or smoked a cigar with your Cognac to celebrate one of the few remaining holidays the taxman allows us revenue producing drones. No sooner have we put the empties out for recycling by the council (or else) than big government has decided we should no longer be allowed such health endangering liberties.
The minimum alcohol pricing law, adding 50p to every unit of alcohol we purchase will become law in England in February, adding another £700M to the coffers of the mighty State, taken directly from our pockets for daring to do what we like with our own bodies and health - the very cheek of us.
Under the guise of reducing "binge drinking" and "policing problems", the 95% of us who can handle a sherry on Boxing Day will be fleeced to provide more cash for a State that already has a plethora of laws to deal with the drunk and disorderly, yet seems unable to enforce them. A gentle "ker-ching" for the treasury will ring out each and every time a naughty citizen pours a gin and tonic or a glass of Pimms on an English summers day and those who are helplessly addicted to the demon booze will simply resort to bootleg ethanol to blind themselves with or robbing old ladies at knifepoint for the price of a can of Special Brew.
Also, in a rather spectacular piece of legislation more akin to the dictats of North Korea, it will now not be legal to display tobacco products in public, lest an impressionable child be seduced by the shiny blue box of a packet of Mayfair King Size and become a lifelong nicotine addled slave to the evil tobacco barons. All tobacco will be sold in white, plain boxes, like wraps of heroin from under the counter of seedy nicotine dealers like Tescos or WH Smiths, whilst the state maintains the moral high ground by grabbing £11 Billion from tobacco duty yet denouncing you as a filthy addict, worthy of distain.
We were promised smaller Government. We were told to take responsibility for ourselves. Yet just 18 months after we threw out the last regime of insipid authoritarians who wanted us stamped, indexed, measured, monitored and regulated, our new rulers are now dictating what we may eat, drink and smoke, with the one thing we truly own, our bodies.
Once again, I can only recommend my readers do the one thing that really ****es off a Politician. Go around them. It is easy to buy a kettle that will distill precious "oils" from organic matter and the internet is your friend should you decide to brew your own beer. I do, at a price of around 20p a pint whilst any Polish plumber worth his salt will supply you with cigarettes at a much reduced price. Do what the rest of Europe does and stick two fingers up to a Government that has subsidised bars in the house of Commons yet refuses to grant the same courtesy to anyone on minimum wage who may like to celebrate the little things in life with a glass of beer. Failing that, the ever popular booze cruise to Calais beckons, where our neighbours appreciate the finer things in life must remain outside the grasps of greedy Government, keen to finance their idiotic vanity projects from our very substinence.
I wish you all a happy new year, which I am quite confident our Politicians will attempt to make a living hell for us, but we do have a choice. Make 2012 the year you pick up the ball and take it home, refusing to play against a team that can change the rules every time it decides it is not winning enough.
 
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