The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1880-06-19 00:00:00

THE MALT- TAX.

The Times has published the following letter
(amongst others) on Mr. Gladstone's proposal for the
repeal of the Malt-tax

—I am surprised that so little attention has been drawn
to the clause in Mr. Gladstone's new Bill giving to house-
holders paying less than £2O a year rent, and to labourers,
permission to brew, free of duty, after paying the nominal
tax of 6s. It is true that under present conditions private
brewing is declining, but Mr. Gladstone seems to forget the
enormous impetus which will be given to it when a man
will be able to brew beer for his family 6s. a barrel cheaper
than the common brewer can possibly supply him with
owing to the extra impost the latter will have to pay.

This cannot fail to act in the most disastrous manner on
the brewers and publicans in agricultural districts, and will,
of course, proportionately tell on the revenue. The only
way to produce a fairer state of affairs would to raise the
licence of the private brewer to the same sum as the com-
mon brewer pays, and even then the private brewer would
have a great advantage. Then, again, we shall have
this anomaly, that one man living in a house rated at £.20 a
year and brewing during the course of the year 15 barrels
of beer will pay to the revenue the sum of £5 duty on the
same, while alongside of him another man living in a house
rated at £l7 will only pay 6s. on the same quantity.—l am,
Sir, yours truly, A BREWER AND FARMER.

Sir,—l cannot understand in what respect the proposed
repeal of the malt-tax will be beneficial to the farmers of
the United Kingdom. I fear that on the contrary they will
find that it will seriously interfere with the use of home-
grown barley by the brewers, and give Nee scope to the
competition of the foreigner in the only sort of grain which
we could still grow profitably. In fact, it will add the one
straw that will break the already overweighted farmer's
back.
The tax is now levied y the Excise (in Ireland, and I
suppose in the rest of the kingdom as well) upon the cubic
measurement of the barley in the "couch " when ready for
malting, and not upon its actual weight, and therefore the
maltster finds it more profitable to use the barley of the
highest specific gravity, or, as the farmer understands it, of
the greatest weight per bushel.
Now, the proposed change will open the way to the use of
the light foreign barley and other substances from which
beer can be made, and so do away with the comparatively
high price of prime malting barley, for the production of
which parts of England and Scotland and the central dis-
tricts of Ireland held the pre-eminence. The change will be
hurtful to the farmer, it will do no good to the consumer of
beer, and it will be an annoyance and trouble to the brewer
—and whom will it benefit?

I believe the importance of malt as a feeding substance
has been much exaggerated, and I fear the farmers will
find too late, what they might from bitter experiefue have
expected, that anything in the nature of a boon offered to
them by Mr. Gladstone would prove a mockery, a delusion,
and a snare.

Apart from party questions, however, I fear that the
result of this change will be disastrous to the best tillage
farmers, and tend to throw more land into grass, and so
diminish the employment given by them to the working
classes.

My excuse for troubling you with this letter must be the
interest that I and my neighbours in the Queen's County
take in the subject as large growers of prime malting
barley.—Your obedient servant, WILLIAM YOUNG.

Brookley-park, Queen's County.

Sir,—As an old advocate of the repeal of the malt-tax, will
you kindly permit me to make a few observations on the
Prime Minister's very unexpected conversion.
The injustice and impolicy of the tax, long since apparent
to plain folk, have taken many years to stimulate the
peculiar conscience of statesmanship into action. The uni-
versal school of Chancellors of the Exchequer (with Mr.
Gladstone at their head), past, present, and future, held us
as fools in the most official contempt, and were our bitterest
opponents. But the folly of the fool became the whetstone
of the wit.
Having stolen our clothes, as the saying is, while we were
bathing, one can hardly fancy the Prime Minister in his
ancient and natural garments objecting to the repeal of the
malt-tax because the coal would be exhausted in so many
hundred years. The wise man has done at last what the
fools wanted him to do at first. But he does not propose to
do it altogether well.

1. There ought to be a provision for brewing in bond for
export. 2. Cottagers under £6 rent and below the voting
list ought to be allowed to brew free of duty and license
altogether. 3. The proposal that those who live in houses
of more than £2O should be subject to Excise visits is
simply an attempt to complicate a very simple thing.
There ought not to be one law for the rich aild another
for the poor. If the poor are to be allowed to brew free of
Excise supervision, so ought the rich. The right way to
deal with this is, to follow the example of the original
Act granting a duty on malt, to give licences for private
brewing at so much a head of the household. In that Act,
I think, ss. a head was the sum charged. I see no reaso?
why brewing in country gentlemen's houses should be mod:
penal. I hope some members of the House of Commio ?;1
will get these changes into the Bill. 4. trposi the n
matter the tax of 6s. 3d. a barrel is equivalenhol
t,so
Gladstone's showing, to 255. a quarter that "
million
quarter extra tax to the Exchequer, over se
of con
-
of revenue. As there will be a great inc rea
ear produce
sumption, probably a ss. duty would next .Y row,
9 .
the present revenue—at any rate, the 55. a
. Whic g
sents the present tax and brewers licensoouhg radual re-
e hould not
ht nat to be
exceeded. Provision should be made for t
ount s
n,
duction- of the tax, so that its gross ab. It is still a tax
exceed the revenue from the malt-tax.
of a beer tax, and as
on the growth of food even in the sha P
ax r cen
obedien.t servant,
titled eventually to
food ought not to be taxed, w
" no taxes on home grown food.e ale
" ou
E. C. CAYLEY.
Yr

York, June 12.
le Chamber of Agricuittwe Jovrnal, whilst bailing the
abolition ot tlio mit 04 P 4 a In9n ts? targtorsa pm* :act

Gladstone "for the courage he has shown in excuting so
complete a change of front on a question whereon past
utterances have led us to recognise the right hon. gentle-
man as our most sturdy and dangerous opponent. When we
put the Budget statement of 10th June, 1880, alongside of
that of 27th April, 1865, the change of tone and argu-
ment is no doubt remarkable. Mr. Gladstone's oonsis-
tency is a matter into which we have no wish to
enter, for after all, as we were lately told, politics
are an eminently practical science. Consistent or not,
he has come right at last on this question; and we are
too glad to learn the fact to inquire too curiously of the
path he has taken. There is no deduction more plainly to
be made from the ultimate, if long deferred, success of the
malt tax agitation than the wisdom of pressing definite and
practical remedies, rather than loud but fruitless efforts of
a more drastic kind. Had the Chambers of Agriculture
gone on clamouring for nothing less than the absolute re-
peal of the malt tax, without substitute or qualification, it
is clear from Mr. Gladstone's language on Thursday that
we should have failed altogether to carry our contention.
A dead and unbalanced loss of eight millions per annum
to the general revenue of the country, and a state of in-
creased anomalies and enhanced injustice between the beer
drinking and spirit drinking sections of the United King-
dom would ever have been sufficient answer to any de-
mand such as some of our earliest enthusiasts put forward.
So far as the Chambers of Agriculture are concerned they
have never hesitated to place malt tax reform among their
most prominent claims, although here and there we have
heard a complaint by the enthusiasts of the cause that the
somewhat exaggerated pleas entertained in some quarters
were hardly endorsed. Often when the demand encountered
nothing but smiles and incredulous remarks from poli-
ticians, who deemed so old a subject threadbare and value-
less for discussion, have the Chambers, nevertheless, re-
turned to the subject. But they have shown something at
least of political wisdom in so clearly adapting the old cry
in a feasible and reasonable form."