Tobacco and Duty

My basis for the £5 argument is that all over Europe the price is less than this and they can be reached for under £50.

If i whacked 6 months worth of cigarettes on a 0% card it would cost £750 + £100 travel.

Buying the same amoutn here would cost almost £1300.

Sadly very true. In fact, Ryanscare are doing £8.99 airfares at the minute, so even with their extortionate hidden costs you could circumvent the taxes so cheaply that it becomes farcical.

Seems like the government missed a beat with being able to take home thousands of cigarettes legally without having to pay UK duty on them. I sometimes wonder if the taxes are inflated here to cover the revenue loss (or at least perceived revenue loss) of people buying them cheaper in the EU.
 
As I said in another post - go to Belgium.
This is where my mum goes every 3-4 months.
She gets her trip through the Channel Tunnel with her Tesco Clubcard vouchers.
An hour drive down the road is the town of Adinkerke, just inside the Belgium border.
Your personal limit is 3200 cigarettes.
Example of prices:

Marlboro gold (19/190) - £40
Benson & Hedges silver (20/200) - £39

I dont' know how that compares with UK prices, but with cigarettes at what, around £6.50 a pack now?
I guess you're looking at around £65 for 200.

France used to be the place to go - very cheap trips over.
However France prices are now no lower than the UK's.
 
if everybody stopped smoking tomorrow, it would leave a big hole in government finances:

1) due to loss of tax
2) increase in living age for all new non smokers, means larger pension bills / council housing bills / or elderly care
 
if everybody stopped smoking tomorrow, it would leave a big hole in government finances:

1) due to loss of tax
2) increase in living age for all new non smokers, means larger pension bills / council housing bills / or elderly care

If everyone had stopped buying petrol for a few days then companies would have been forced to drop their prices.
Remember that idea from a couple of years ago?

All drivers need petrol all smokers are addicted - there is no "everyone stopping smoking".
There will always be a nice percentage doing it and always a nice percentage of new smokers to keep the money rolling in.
 
Its pretty big bussiness for the paramilitary groups here, the loyalist groups even buy ciggarettes from the republican groups to sell in local pubs/clubs.

It's comical as sections of both sides are really anti drugs and go about "policing" it them selves when they all prey on the weak with cigarettes.

Meet man a friends parents who have had to sell them for local groups (either side again) and it sounded such a dodgy setup! Same people complaing that the army and PSI/RUC wouldn't stop bothering them through out the 80's and 90's... Never had the heart to tell them that it probably was for good reason (not the over the top military style occupation but the regular and random surveillance probably was).

As for duty, smoking is bad. Its proven to be bad. There's lot's of proof. Taxing the hell out of it is the only way people will seem to listen to this as telling people its detrimental to someone's health is just ignored and if it was outlawed it'd be impossible to enforce, so we might as well make a lot of money taxing it. Same with drinking really.
 
If they made weed legal, they could drop on fags taxes, because they would earn moneys! But no, what's the point :]
 
If they made weed legal, they could drop on fags taxes, because they would earn moneys! But no, what's the point :]

They could do a great deal of good by legalising cannabis and taxing the hell out of it - I'd rather pay £20 for 2g of taxed, legal cannabis than £20 for 3.5g from a scummy ***** on Margate seafront, for a myriad of reasons. However, given the nature of the British public, it'll be decades before anything like that happens, if it happens at all.
 
just put a tax of £10 a packet on it and make smokers pay for smoking related nhs treatment, problem solved!

Smokers annually contribute approx £11 billion in duty to the government coffers and consume ( if that is the right word) approximately £4 billion in NHS treatment - perhaps you may not understand how accounts work but, that means smokers actually positively contribute around £7 billion!

Now justify why you want to see a £10.00 tax on cigarettes?
 
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