Tobacco Duty rose by a whopping £1.21 on a packet of 20 cigarettes yesterday. Bad news for all puffing co-conspirators…
Factory-made cigarette duty jumped from £353.50 to £394.09 per 1,000 – an 11.48% increase – while hand-rolling tobacco is being whacked with an even bigger hike, rising from £503.80 to £574.30 per kilo. Even the right-on luvvies of the FT thought it was a bad idea…
As the pink’un related, a decade after Australia began its crackdown on smoking, tax now makes up 70% of the price of legal tobacco – proportionally the most expensive in the world. The result? 8.5 billion Australian Dollars is now spent on illegal cigarettes each year, with 80% of tobacco on the black market – fuelling organised crime linked to more than 300 firebombings and three murders. Does not bode well for Burnham’s pledge to clean up the high street…
The Australian Bureau of Statistics said in June that the quantity of nicotine consumed in Australia increased by almost 40% between 2017 and 2025. So Labour-style tax hikes have actually seen consumption rise…
Green Deputy Leader Rachel Millward said:
“The reality is that it’s Zack Polanski who brought the nation, Andy Burnham. And if we hadn’t had the success of the Green Party in this last year since Zack’s been leading, which has been unprecedented, phenomenal success and a growth from about 60,000 members to 230,000, if we hadn’t had that much pressure on Labour, then we’d probably still be in the Starmer regime, which was pretty much ushering in a Reform government with its lurch to the right. So actually, what we’re seeing now is that we’ve set the political agenda and the government is picking that up.”