Mrs Thatcher, The Beerage, & Small Brewers Duty Relief
The Government announced headline details on changes to Small Brewers Duty Relief on Tuesday. I’ll post about the specifics separately but suffice to say the changes were not in favour of small brewers but rather bigger regional to national ones.
A number of these such as St Austell and Harveys had lobbied for changes to the Duty which broadly as now proposed benefit them.
My interest here is in what this says about the Beerage in 2020
The Beerage is a term dating back to the late nineteenth century that details the financial and political links between many brewers and the Tory Party:
In recent times that link appears to have been seriously diminished.
By the 1970s the Beerage was essentially the Big Six brewers such as Whitbreads and Watneys. Mrs Thatcher promoted the Beer Orders in 1989 which aimed to break up their control of the industry by limiting the number of pubs they could own. That created the Pub Companies we know today.
This coincided with a political move by Thatcher to move the Tory Party away from its traditional industrial base and focus much more on financial services, the City of London and so on.
While the Beerage still exists- see the Sunday Times Rich List 2020- its hardly Tory Party focused but rather part of global business:
https://kmflett.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/the-sunday-times-rich-list-2020-the-beerage-in-crisis/
I was coming to the view that maybe the Pub Companies and the likes of Tim Martin were really the Beerage in 2020.
The Duty Relief move may suggest that the Tory Party still sees values with the historic links it has with Regional brewers (not particularly those on the list of those who lobbied for the duty change) which would not exactly be in the tradition of Mrs Thatcher..
Something to ponder over a glass of beer…
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