And Then, Back Of A Fag Packet...

Further to the last post wherein I suggested that the governmental panel on alternative nicotine delivery systems would result in taxing situations, I thought I’d do a little light amateur investigation and it quickly became obvious why the government have suddenly jumped up and taken notice. I apologise in advance if I’ve made any figure blunders below.

In the linked Bloomberg article a figure of three million vapours was mentioned. This figure must be taken with a pinch of snuff as nobody contacted me so should the figure be three million and one? Is it less than three million? Or is it four million? For the purpose of my ‘in depth’ research I decided to be ultra conservative. Three million? Let’s call it two million. Of those, many will be dual use folk so I further reduced the figure to a lowly one million who’ve switched to vaping, just vaping, and dumped smokes completely.

Further intense research conducted by typing into Google, seemed to suggest that the tax on a pack of twenty is £6.98. Okay, after picking myself up I decided to call it a mere – mere? £6. So it seems for the three packs a week I used to smoke I was ‘giving’ the government £18. That is £18 they don’t get from me anymore so the government’s £18 a week worse off; big deal, right?

Anyhoo, I’m betting you can see where this is going. Of course you can. Forget the proper quitters and those who’ve found ‘alternative’ supply streams, let’s just consider our low estimate of those who’ve switched to vaping.   Let’s further say that those one million converts used to average three packs o’ smokes each a week and – boom!! The government’s losing £18,000,000 a week. After a further couple of hours with a calculator and six A4 pads and three pens, that came to £936,000,000 per year. And that £936,000,000 would be an absolute minimum figure per year that’s disappeared, in a puff of vapour, from the grasp of the exchequer.

And we should believe that the governmental panel is being formed to explore the health and safety aspects of alternative nicotine delivery systems? Really? Yeah, right. Ticktock - tax.

Quote;  Frédéric Bastiat.

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”