POLITICS
How Mr Blair can ensure that the Conservatives are borne down in a torrent of gin and beer
BORIS JOHNSON
Athe risk of belabouring the subject of Mr Blair and his apparently limitless scope for humiliating the Tory party, I have a further suggestion. After some thought, I have concluded, not entirely frivolously, that if he follows my scheme he will not merely storm to power on a great, boiling wave of popular enthusiasm. Even before he does that, the Labour leader will expe- dite the bankruptcy and demoralisation of the Conservatives.
As we have lately discovered, Central Office is in straitened circumstances. Mr Jeremy Hanley, party chairman, is facing revolt by the grocers, builders and bankers who keep him in felt-tip pens. Marks & Spencer, and even Hanson — great Scott! — have initiated contact with the Labour leader. Safeway, Woolworth's, British Air- ways and Lazards have stopped their stand- ing orders. These days, it seems, no sooner does the Tory collection plate heave into view than businessmen clap their hands to their chests and discover that they have inexplicably left their wallets somewhere else.
One industry, though, is faithful. One group has been loyal, say some historians, since Mr Gladstone's Liberals were so fool- ish as to introduce a puritanical Licensing Act, and thereby cause almost every publi- can in the land to desert to Mr Disraeli in 1874. I refer to the brewers. Oh, their bene- factions may not be huge nowadays: per- haps they rank only third or fourth behind the City, and the construction and food industries. The biggest donor among them, Scottish & Newcastle, is said to be more worried about the Scots Nationalists win- ning seats than the Conservatives losing them; and as a group, with Whitbread, Vaux, Fuller's, Greenalls and Morland, the brewers last year made a bare £100,500 contribution, hardly enough to buy a seat in the House of Lords.
But it is a reassuring part of Tory mythol- ogy that the teerage' should drink Tory health with every pint of the warm ale internationally commended by Mr Major. It has been so ever since the aforemen- - tinned magnificent election victory in the last century, and, in spite of the odd row about the tied house system, it remains so. Never mind about these other shopkeepers and moneymen, the Tories can tell them- selves. The brewers are with us.
How much more crushing a blow to morale, therefore, it would be if they were to defect to the opposition. As it happens, they are in a mood to be faithless. Already, Allied-Lyons, the food and drinks giant which gave £100,000 per year to the party in the run-up to the 1992 election, has cut its donations to nil. Why? If you have just returned by ferry from your Bite in the Dor- dogne, you will be familiar with the key rea- son for their disgruntlement.
Let us pass over the half-dozen cases of lager that threatened to break the back axle of your Volvo, which were demonstrably for your personal consumption. Or rather, let us consider them as part of the big eco- nomic picture. If you looked carefully around the 'Tropicana' lounge of the Pride of Canterbury, or wherever you were, you will have seen other people stockaded behind pipkins of Stella Artois or L6wen- bran, bought in France at less than half the price of beer in Britain. Of the 28 million pints of beer drunk every day in this coun- try, about one million are now brought across the Channel, about 3.3 per cent of the market.
This influx, the brewers claim, is costing them £500 million a day. Pubs in Kent, according to the Brewers and Licensed Retail Association, are quietly folding; off- licences are closing. And all because the 20-month-old Single Market allows us to buy foreign beer with excise duty of 4p per pint instead of British beer with 30p duty per pint.
Now, the Brewers are busy cultivating their friends in the Tory party and beyond. All the MPs in Westminster are seized of the problem. Regular fact-finding missions have been spotted pushing their jumbo trolleys around the `Mamouth' hyperstore in Calais. There is a House of Commons beer club, featuring Betty Boothroyd. The Commons Treasury select committee, headed, until the reshuffle by Mr John 'They've put up the price of milk teeth.' Watts, is to look into the whole business, and will be reporting in the autumn.
But the Tories know that their options are limited. It would be a Sisyphean task to try to police the booze cruises, and arrest those who intended to sell on their Stella. And anyway, for my money, the very con- cept of 'smuggling' is absurd in a Europe which should have no fiscal frontiers. Indeed, as one the very few immediate improvements to their lives which people can attribute to the European Community, I should imagine that Mr Hurd and the Foreign Office would be deeply reluctant to see this freedom removed.
What else can the Government do? Even supposing that the brewers are not exagger- ating, and the total loss in excise revenue to the exchequer genuinely is £150 million per year as a result of foreign purchases, Mr Clarke knows he would lose far more if he cut Britain's exorbitant rates of excise. Beer duty alone contributes about £2.25 billion per year to the Treasury. If the Tory party were to pacify the brewers by ending the relative attractions of Calais, it would have to find the lost income elsewhere. That would mean raising some other form of tax, such as income tax, or Vat; both politically disastrous.
Mr Blair, on the other hand, has no such inhibitions. He could easily find some soak- the-rich tax to compensate, perhaps on div- idends. In other words, I am proposing that Tony Blair make one promise on tax before the election, and one only: that he will cut alcohol excise duty in Britain until it is more in line with other European coun- tries. At a stroke he would be 'harmonising' with Europe (a good thing, in his terms), and earning the loyalty and even financial support of the brewers. Most delicious of all, he would be able to go into the 1996 election campaign on a platform of . . . cheap beer for the nation! As Gladstone wrote gloomily to his brother Robertson, after he had offended the brewers and lost the election: 'I have no doubt what is the principal [cause]. We have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer.' If Tony Blair can enlist the support of the great British beer-drinker, not to speak of Marks & Spencer, the same fate, I fancy, could befall Mr Major.
Boris Johnson is on the staff of the Daily Telegraph.
Previous page
