Latest Simon Buckley column from the Journal

The latest Simon Buckley 'Iechyd Da' column from the Carmarthen Journal -
Whatever anyone says about Gordon Brown and his lack of ability to manage the nation’s finances, he did at least give the small brewers of Britain the chance to compete with their bigger rivals with the introduction of progressive beer duty.
In simplistic terms, progressive beer duty was introduced by the last Labour government to bring competition to an otherwise highly uncompetitive industry, where the big boys rule ok!
Small brewers such as ourselves were given beneficial beer duty rates to be able to put high quality beers on the bar counters of the UK alongside the national and regional brewers. They are beers that the consumer wants and that the larger brewers cannot produce.
Typically the small brewers pay half the beer duty of the national and regional brewers. This allows us to compete against the factory brewers who have the massive advantage of scale.
Quietly, between Christmas and the New Year, the government leaked the fact that progressive beer duty would be reduced from £54 per brewer’s barrel to £19 per barrel.
And why was that? Well, because the old ‘Family Brewers of Britain’, two of whom are based here in Wales, leant on the Tory government and said that the progressive beer duty was harming their business and that ‘their’ government needed to do something about it.
And they certainly have done something about it. In three years time, the small brewing sector (if this idiotic piece of legislation goes through) will no longer exist as we know it today.
The hundreds of small brewers (who often employ significantly more people per barrel brewed than the regional brewers and often in locations where unemployment is high) will cease to be able to compete.
We will then return to the ’70s with the beer trade back in the hands of a clutch of regional brewers.
The significant growth of specialist cask ales, the only sector in the drinks industry to have shown consistent growth over the last five years, has only done that on the back of the huge success of the small brewers. As one of my mentors once said, you survive on quality, quality and quality alone!
Not so long ago, I sat in the office of a well-known family brewer in Carmarthenshire, who lectured me that cask ale was dying.
How wrong he was, and to this day a once great cask ale brewer, who won international awards languishes, having missed the opportunity to follow us smaller brewers on the road of quality ales.
If we as a nation allow this inept piece of legislation to enter the statute book, we will see the significant craft brewing industry destroyed, ruined by a government that believes that it is supporting small businesses.
I hope in due course that the readers of the Journal will join with my company and our thousands of loyal customers to register their disbelief at this crass piece of legislation and to lobby to get this decision over-turned.