For many, I suspect, opposing the UK’s inordinately high tax on beer is part of a more general opposition to taxation as such.

For me, the problem is that duty and VAT are forms of regressive taxation. They do the opposite of what tax is supposed to do — redistribute wealth from the well-off to the less well-off. Someone on £20,000 a year drinking 20 pints a week in their local is going to feel a tax increase much more sharply than someone on £100,000. It’s taking a much higher proportion of their income. And as Pete Brown graphically showed this week, there is also a widening gap between the burden of duty on beer and that for wine and spirits.

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