The price of beer. An issue of class
The price of beer is in the news again. The impact of COVID and the war in Ukraine is pushing prices up.
The general points are around increases in the cost of raw materials, production (i.e canning) energy and the impact of Brexit. Of course businesses traditionally make such points as much as I as a trade union officer argue for wage increases.
If the price of beer goes up, does it matter however? After all no one has to drink it, and numbers don’t. The reality is that the price of beer forms part of the Retail Price Index so it is an important economic measure. I suspect though this is notoriously difficult to prove, that the price of beer has outstripped wage increases over a lengthy period. One outcrop of that is the success of Wetherspoons where you can find a pint of cask beer for as little as £1.39 a pint in some places.
Historically beer was considered part of the normal diet for many workers involved in heavy industrial or agricultural labour and was one focus for the ‘standard of living’ debate about whether living standards fell or rose as industrialisation proceeded after 1800.
More specifically thanks to a Malt Tax first introduced to fund the country’s wars in the early eighteenth century, the price of brewer produced beer was considered to be high by the first decades of the nineteenth century. It also made the cost of home brewing a traditional practice, prohibitive.
E P Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class reports a letter from a magistrate in 1816 arguing that the Malt Tax would lead to revolution. In fact numbers of unregulated and unlicensed premises circumvented the law. Reality intervened with the 1830 Beershops Act that made the opening of premises specifically to sell beer much easier and much less costly.
Expect the controversy to continue, though Assizes of Ale, Government assistance to brewers and price regulation would all help.
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