Sunak & Johnson at Fourpure brewing. Why there?
The photoshoot by Chancellor Sunak and PM Johnson to underline changes to beer duty announced in Tuesday’s Budget didn’t go too well. They were pictured handling 30 litre kegs but Sunak had said that duty cuts for draught beer would apply to 40 litre kegs and above.
That is not yet set in stone and there is scope to campaign to get it lowered, as it won’t happen for a while yet.
It still leaves the question of why Fourpure thought it was a good idea to wreck any element of credibility it has by hosting a Tory photoshoot.
After all Fourpure is definitively not part of the Beerage, UK based brewers who donate to the Tories. Its owned by Australian brewer Lion which in turn is owned by Japanese brewer Kirin. Such is global big beer.
There is no real evidence of Fourpure having links to the Tories. There are stories that Matt Hancock was meant to be organising a Tory social there. He does after all know pubs and landlords. However there is no evidence that this is actually true or in fact happened.
Lion does donate to Australian political parties- equally to Labour and the Liberals(think Tories).
Perhaps we can expect Keir Starmer to host an event at Fourpure then. After all he does actually like craft beer.
Arguably the stunt may have damaged the image of craft beer, although was it really telling us anything about the big beer end of that market we didnt already know?
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