ANOTHER VOICE
Here is a policy that would help the police, bring pleasure to millions and might even boost the Tories
BORIS JOHNSON
It is not often that an idea flashes into my head. But the other night I had an insight which, with all due modesty, I believe to be of stunning and transcendent brilliance. Properly handled, my wheeze could not only encourage millions of apathetic voters to look favourably on the Tories. It would also cut crime, relieve the police of a point- less and debilitating struggle, and reduce the cost of the nation's pleasures. The idea came to me, as with all my ideas, in a moment of desperation.
The scene was the basement in the Wes- sex Hotel, Bournemouth: a debate organ- ised by the think-tank Politeia on the theme of 'The Tory way to cut taxes'. The room boiled with eggheads, accountants, tax- experts and assorted grinning journalists. They were grinning because the multitudes had come to hear three giants of economic thinking, namely Dr Oliver Letwin, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury and generator of innumerable ground-breaking policies, Professor Tim Congdon, the mon- etarist seer, and, er, myself. After about an hour, it was obvious that some of my answers lacked the amplitude that one might expect from someone with a detailed knowledge of the tax system. 'In what cir- cumstances should a businessman be able to roll over tax losses from one year to the next?' one poor man asked; and I whiffled away, with that ghastly feeling one used to get in an exam when asked to write an essay about the Venerable Bede, and all one can remember is that he was a monk who lived in Jarrow, and you find yourself discussing what Jarrow 'must have been like' back then, and the contours of his beard.
And then someone — in fact it was our own foreign editor, Andrew Gimson asked a question about excise duty on fuel and alcohol, which the chairman passed to me for an answer. The Tories had pledged to cut 3p from the tax on a litre of petrol, said Gimson. But there were other forms of excise duty which were just as oppressive, he said. What was the Tory message for all the poor people of this country who wanted (and needed) to smoke cigarettes, on which Gordon Brown had placed his exorbitant levies? What were we going to do to help the beer-drinkers of the nation, driven by the rapacity of the Treasury to smuggling innumerable pipkins of Stella from Calais? What was our policy for the nation, demanded Gimson. Hey, what? As I rose to my feet I was conscious of all thought draining from my brain, as when a colander is lifted from a sink of water. All powers of ratiocination seemed to have gone. And then, suddenly, it flash-bulbed in my head: the answer. The problem, as out- lined by Gimson, is getting worse every month. The police now calculate that 25 per cent of all cigarettes in this country are contraband, and in London the figure is put at 50 per cent. In great stretches of the North-East, the supply of these basic con- sumer goods is almost entirely controlled by criminal gangs, and in Kent the police are tied down in an unwinnable war with bejewelled Geordies. Honest folk every- where have been turned into knowing receivers of smuggled goods. It is brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk, and watch the wall, my darling, as the gentle- men go by. Of course it is, when 50 grammes of rolling tobacco costs £8.50 in the UK, as against £1.80 in Belgium. No wonder 80 per cent of rolling tobacco in this country has been illicitly imported. And yet, as Gimson saw, the position is even worse for the decent folk, the law-abiding folk, the instinctively Tory drinkers and smokers who don't want to be involved in some illegal racket, and always buy their booze and fags at legitimate outlets. These duties, for such people, are deeply regres- sive and unfair. Oh, we dress them up, as we dress up the duty on petrol, and we pre- tend that they have a high-minded social justification, such as preventing disease. In fact, people still drink and smoke according to their inner compulsions, just as they are still obliged to use their cars.
It's an ode people's home.' The tax is not corrective, but simply retributive, a puritanical punishment for what society sees as a vice; and as with petrol tax, it falls the hardest on the poor. Now at that fateful moment, as I opened my mouth — and my journalist friends leered from the audience — I could have recommended that we cut the excise on alcohol and tobacco. I could have suggest- ed that we take off a few pennies, just as the Tory party has already promised with petrol. Cutting the duty would, in princi- ple, erode the profits of the smugglers and encourage honesty. But like one who, driv- ing fast at night, suddenly sees the head- lights of an oncoming car, I detected a dif- ficulty ahead. I couldn't, I just couldn't lop more tax off drinking and smoking, because I knew that Professor Congdon was ready to leap up and ask where the money was coming from, and which schools'n'hospitals I was proposing to close; and so I veered, and I saw the solu- tion; a far more elegant solution.
The present state of the law is mad. As things stand, you can bring any quantity of duty-paid alcohol and tobacco into Britain from France. But you may not sell it. You can bring juggernauts of the stuff across; you can build yourself great funeral pyres of cigarettes. But you may not sell them. Isn't that absurd? There is, as far as I know, no other such prohibition in existence on the statute book. There is no other sub- stance which you can legitimately buy, in shops, over the counter, and which you may not sell on to whomsoever you choose.
It is a ridiculous and infamous infringe- ment of liberty. So I say to you — as I said to the audience the other night — let us cut the Gordonian knot! Let us allow the free trade in alcohol and tobacco, bought else- where in the European single market, to flourish in this country. At a stroke, we would end the smuggling. We would liber- ate the police to catch criminals. We would bring down the price of these goods, and we would punish the Treasury for its greed. We would allow people to make use of the freedom that Europe has brought them, without the interference of Whitehall. Above all — and this is the supreme beauty of the thing — it is a reform that celebrates the single market. My slogan is: Let's make Europe work for you! And if that isn't a policy, a vote-winning policy, I don't know what is.
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