A rare piece of activism [Matthew's Journal]

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I don't get political very frequently, so forgive me this once! CAMRA is calling on people to get their MP to support Early Day Motion 331. Essentially, the DTI is proposing to define a pint as "not less than 95%" liquid; given that pints would regularly have to be 2 or 3 % shorter than that for anyone to actually get prosecuted, this would allow pubs to serve you 7% froth as a matter of course. That means that ~15p you spend on every pint is being wasted. It also means that breweries get screwed over (a pub doing this can serve 76 or more pints from a 72-pint barrel), and the treasurery sees less duty than it ought to.

Early Day Motion 331 calls for 1 pint to be officially declare to be 1 pint. Doesn't sound too difficult, does it? The motion has gathered a fair backing, but needs more. Please contact your MP and get them to support it. The relevant bit of the CAMRA website has more details.

Mood::

determined

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There are 9 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Can you explain why the treasury gets less duty than it should? I'd have thought the amount of duty was related to the price of a pint, so would be levied at the time of pint sale and therefore is always the same proportion of the pint cost regardless of customer shortchanging. If the tax is levied at the time of sale of the barrel that would explain it, but that seems like a strange way of doing things.

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AIUI, the duty is levied per barrel, with an assumption beind made of how many pints you'll sell per barrel.

timeplease may be along in a moment to correct me, however.

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emperor is correct. Duty is paid when the beer leaves the brewery; Customs agrees with each brewery a nominal quantity of saleable beer per container (i.e. how much ullage allowance there is; breweries that sell more dry-hopped beer may get a larger allowance because there's more waste), and this is paid by the brewery on every cask they
sell.

If a pub manages to sell more pints from a cask than there are in it, through giving short measure, they get all the benefit and the government doesn't get any.

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Dear, there are more important political causes in the world

*hugs*

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Many of those are much harder to do something about.

As an aside, I think your point is in general unhelpful. Should we do nothing about e.g. gay rights in the UK because in other parts of the world gay people still get killed for being gay?

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No; there is a complicated optimisation of how much effort one should put into something based on

its importance;
the cost/benefit ratio of "doing something";
something horribly step-function-ish resulting from the fact that kinetic barriers mean that below a certain amount of effort, no benefit accrues;
the total amount of effort you have available;
the number of other people better placed to put effort in more efficiently than yourself.

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And here the cost is a second class stamp. I'm for activism on the small things that you *might* be able to change :)

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Or "nothing" - you can send your MP an email (off your own bat, or via the webform) if you like.

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(I'm not disagreeing with you, as such, but ...)

In the "cost" column is also, I think: that your MP has finite effort available, and if you convince them they need to do A to get re-elected, they may not bother with B (that you might have preferred them to do).

So, yes, this probably is cheap-and-worthwhile activism, but cost/benefit analysis is not just a matter of your own money/time/effort (I think; although this is the kind of area where I worry that I may be thinking brokenly)

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Matthew's Journal

A rare piece of activism

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October