Just done battle with Customs and Excise. You may not believe this but here goes: They used to have 2 tiers of charging. One was anything over £15.00 for gifts
attracted charges, that is still the case but the other tier of anything over
£18.00 for merchandise has been scrapped. See what they did there? Now you pay charges for practically
anything. One of my parcels was for 3
small Star Trek Pins totalling $23.97 and I went over the £15.00 limit by a
whopping, tax destroying, bring the whole country to its knees cost of …
£0.03p. So for this enormous sin of
going over the threshold by such an enormous amount I have been hit with a VAT
charge of £3.03 and £8.00 'Handling Fee' from Royal Mail. Won't be buying from this particular place
again. The second cost attracted VAT of
£9.99 and the 'Handling Fee' of £8.00 this should make your eyes water -
apparently I have to pay VAT on the cost of the postage AS WELL AS the VAT on
the boots. You couldn't make it up but
it is correct and guess where it comes from … go on … you'll never guess … the EU
of course, got it in one. The EU has
decreed that British people have to pay VAT on post costs associated with
getting the parcel from where it was sent.
I'm just wondering what they'll dream up for their next tax whizz, what
colour shoes did the person have one when they were sending the parcel? say £10
for red, £15 for blue etc and what time did they get up? You could have a
sliding scale for the time of day they got up, and what about the sender's star
sign, their preference of pet, where they went to school, what food they like
to eat – the list is endless! I say
these things in jest but they may already be thinking these things up as I
write. Either that or I've just given
them the idea.
Can we PLEASE come out of this useless EU NOW!
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