'There are some strange anomalies in the food VAT system. Were I to buy a live horse (as my girlfriend would want me to – though presumably not to kill and eat later) I would have to pay the standard rate of VAT. If, though, a friendly farmer has already saved me the bother of killing it (I’m really really sorry – you know I would only buy live horses to give to you), then I can have a whole dead horse – or horse cutlets – vacpacked and sold to me as exotic meat, VAT-free. Why? Live horses aren’t considered a recognised food species. Dead horses, presumably, are.
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Monkey nuts (peanuts in their shells) fall under the zero rate; the second you remove the horrible outer shell, they become KP nuts (or some other equally popular brand) and you have to pay VAT. It’s not even the roasting or salting that makes the difference – it’s the shell. Honest.
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If you pop into your local bakery from today, eye up those gingerbread men with caution. If their little toes have been dipped in chocolate (because gingerbread men’s feet would get blisters if they had to walk without shoes), then the government has ruled them to be too extravagant. They’re parading around in their chocolate boots, while your average Tom, Dick or Harry Gingerbread has to make do with a pittance. ‘Gingerbread men decorated with chocolate’ come under the standard rate of VAT, ‘unless this amounts to no more than a couple of dots for eyes’. Bakers of Britain: let your gingerbread men and women run naked, free like pre-Lapsarian Adam and Eve! We’ll have no fancy winklepickers, thank you: this is austerity Britain.
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Millionaire’s Shortbread is zero-rated while plebian chocolate-covered shortbread is taxed at the full rate. I don’t think I need to explain why that one is funny.'
2. Mr Eugenides has the killer phrase: 'Vince Cable looks like he's swallowed a shit-flavoured landmine.' Indeed he did.
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I had a problem signing on, but OK now !
Yes, Vince Cable's face was a picture all through the speech. He probably can't believe that , suddenly, he has been marginalised in politics and at the BBC !
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