This could prove interesting.
Soft drinks makers including Coca Cola are reportedly considering suing the Government over George Osborne’s plans to implement a tax on sugary drinks, which could never see the light of day.
Industry bosses are drawing up plans for a legal challenge to the tax, according to reports in the Guardian and the Sunday Times.
Good. And I hope they win. The very concept of this nasty, spiteful tax is wholly wrong and based upon the worst kind of junk science. With Osborne’s budget holed below the waterline by IDS’ resignation, maybe, just maybe, this evil little tax won’t see the light of day and Jamie Oliver’s little dance of triumph will have been in vain.
The comments below the line tell a depressing story of nasty authoritarian tendencies that this type of show-boating appeals to. I have to share a planet with these creatures. Depressing, or what?
Good to see that at least some of the big corps, like Coca Cola, have taken due note of the treatment meted out to their oppo’s in the tobacco industry and have seen where compromising, even at the first stages, in order to appear “reasonable” and “concerned,” inevitably leads. What a shame the general public haven’t made the same connection vis-a-vis the treatment handed out to smokers inevitably, once “permitted” by them, inevitably being applied to other areas, too. At least the “slippery slope,” much denied by anti-smoking activists the world over, has been seen and noted to exist by some people – albeit it’s because of their bottom line, rather than because of the erosion of the principles of free choice and individual freedom. But it’s a start, at least.
Well said.
Hear, hear!
What is very, very frightening is that so many of the dumb Indie commentators think there is something fundamentally wrong in companies suing governments which introduce discriminatory laws. Companies have the same standing as individuals and have the same rights to be protected from capricious and unjust laws.
Indeed, one wonders why so few people understand the etymologies and history of business terms like “corporation” (from the Latin ‘corpus’ meaning ‘body’) and “legal entity”.
A business that is incorporated in some way, (like the BBC), is explicitly defined in legal terms to allow it to be treated as a legal “person”. This eliminates the need to maintain a completely set of parallel laws on the books just for businesses: you can just apply most of the laws already in use for humans instead.
E.g. if two people create a contract between each other, Contract Law applies. As most businesses can be treated legally as people, the exact same laws can be applied to contracts between businesses, and between a business and a person, without the need to provide multiple sets of laws governing different combinations. (In IT terminology, this comes under Interaction / Interface Design.)
The obvious corollary is that any laws that exist to protect ordinary people from unjust or unfair laws may *also* apply to *any* corporate body, including “legal persons”. Such as businesses.
Quite what the hell these politicians are learning at university these days escapes me. I don’t even have a degree, but even I knew this wasn’t going to end well.
Ah, but it isn’t as cut and dried as that.
From what I’ve read, Coca Cola et al aren’t thinking about suing because of the ‘sugar tax’ itself, they are suing because they have been singled out, and fruit juices, smoothies etc will be exempt. They don’t really care about the tax, which they will just pass on to the consumers anyway. What they want is that ‘level playing field’ (sound familiar?) so that everyone loses equally. That is, they want to protect their market share. They couldn’t give a flying fuck about the tax itself. After all, it’s not as if it’s them who will be paying it, so why should they?
I think they do care about the tax and they have lobbied against it. They are not able to legally challenge a tax as such anymore than we can challenge taxes. However, they can challenge a tax that discriminates against them and favours competitors. Given the supposed basis of the tax, i.e. health benefits, the exclusions do appear arbitrary.