UNITED STATES—American readers may not be acquainted with Andy Burnham, so a brief introduction might be of benefit. Burnham is the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, installed in July after the previous occupant, Keir Starmer, resigned. The new unappointed PM arrived in office following a raft of predecessors who have come and gone with such alarming speed in recent years that Downing Street would do well to install a revolving door. That, or better locks, to stop evidently incompetent PMs from bolting quite so frequently.
In his first three days, he announced the usual humdrum of aggressive policies, one of which affects what is arguably the last bastion of Britishness (cricket and polite cueing aside), the local pub. With British boozers in sharp decline, thanks to several years of heavy taxation and a generation that would rather drink at home for half the price, a savior was needed. Burnham seized the opportunity to impress the masses.
In his speech, he announced a plan to save pubs by slashing business rates by 20 percent. Pubs, Burnham explained during a ‘man of the people’ photo opportunity while conveniently sitting in one, are working-class heritage. Together with his new cabinet, he declared that “the cavalry was coming” to support landlords and punters everywhere. It is the kind of line that sounds tremendous until you quickly realize that the cavalry has to be paid for. The problem is that the Prime Minister had not worked out how.
Who Pays
To fund the saving of the pub, Burnham is stripping tax relief from businesses that do not make “a positive contribution to local communities.” Chief among the named villains, sitting alongside the High Street gambling arcades and discount stores, is the now ubiquitous vape store. In Burnham’s opinion, vape stores “don’t add much to community life and cause other issues too.”
Now, his claim makes a lot of sense, to a point. Anyone who has walked a British high street (which is the equivalent of Main Street, for the unfamiliar) knows exactly the type of establishment he is referring to. It is the store that seems to shift barely one or two vaping pods each week, yet never seems to struggle financially, usually has a BMW or Mercedes parked outside, and has possibly turned up in more than one police investigation.
A store that, just in case you aren’t catching the drift here, appears to exist for some purpose other than its limited trade in blueberry menthol. Potential or even alleged Money laundering establishments. There, we said it.
It’s a phenomenon that has developed quite considerably over the last decade in the UK, with desolate UK town centers commonly saturated with vape stores – all of which are bereft of clientele. Many would say these places are a genuine blot on society, and they were a blot long before Burnham found a useful soundbite in them. Again, on that narrow point, he is certainly not wrong.
Unfair Targeting
But you cannot tax a suspicion. Not yet at least. You can only tax a category, and the category is “vape stores,” which happens to include an awful lot of people who are not laundering anything whatsoever, including money.
Most of the honest, legitimate vape stores are online in the UK. That is where the real trade lives now, away from the high street entirely, and it is a different animal from the cash-only unit with the papered-over windows. Your typical online retailer ships a bottle of e-liquid to a construction worker in Leeds who is trying to stay off the cigarettes. Conversely, many of the High Street vape stores in the UK couldn’t care less whether they sell vapes. The former is exactly the type of retailer that Burnham’s blunt little tax will hit hardest, because it is the one that keeps an address, files its accounts properly, and coughs up when the government demands it.
The dodgy High Street operator has been through this sort of thing before and will either swallow the cost without noticing or pull down the shutters and reopen two streets over under a different name and a cousin’s signature, which was always the way the business was built to work. A tax announced as a reckoning for the worst of the high street will therefore be paid, almost in full, by the best of it.
Model Citizen
There is something almost amusing in a government punishing the one part of an industry that already behaves the way governments are forever demanding industries behave. The reputable online seller runs the age checks that the corner shop performs with a shrug, keeps the records, pays the duty on every bottle, and sells a legal product to grown adults who have decided for themselves what to do with their own lungs.
A well-run vape superstore is not the villain of this story, and it will feel the tax burden because it never arranged its affairs to dodge one. In the meantime, the man Burnham was really pointing at carries on unbothered, having long since given up expecting the authorities to catch him.
The Point
Save the great British pub by all means. It deserves saving, for reasons that have nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with its being one of the few institutions left that could not plausibly exist anywhere but in the UK. Surely a country is allowed to spend money defending the things that make it recognizably itself.
What it is not allowed to do (or possibly ought not to be) is dress up a raid on a law-abiding online retailer as a crackdown, simply because they honor their responsibilities. Burnham promised the cavalry, and it would appear the cavalry has duly arrived. It’s just a shame they have the wrong address.
