Subway fell on the wrong side of similar tax laws in Ireland - their sugar content in their bread was too high, so for tax purposes, their subs are legally cakes: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/01/919189045/for-subway-a-ruling...

Yes, Jaffa Cakes - minature sponge cakes flavoured with Jaffa oranges. Cakes aren't subject to Value Added Tax in the UK, which allows them to be sold more cheaply to the consumer or have a greater profit margin. A tribunal confirmed that they are true, real and genuine cakes, so you may feel entitled to enjoy your tax-free treat!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandco...

There is a musical I saw at the fringe about this.

I love strange musicals! Link in case anyone else is curious: https://playbill.com/article/is-it-a-cake-or-a-biscuit-a-jaf...

It's wild to me that anything you can buy in a store, especially something frivolous like cake, might be tax free.

In a way it's not completely tax-free; the embodied costs of producing and selling the cake are still taxed with employee income tax, National Insurance, import duties and so on.

The UK's exemption from VAT covers lots of things, but not an entirely logical selection: cakes are considered staples and are exempt, but drinks (including soft drinks, beer and mineral water) are taxed at the full 20% rate.

In general, I would personally prefer that the UK not have VAT, as it's a regressive tax (people with lower incomes pay a greater percentage of their income on it than high earners do).

I think basic and healthy foods should be VAT exempt. Bread, milk, eggs, vegetables, fruit (maybe not fruit that needs to be shipped from South America or Africa), water etc. Also maybe school books and newspapers and of course medicine. Sugary drinks _should_ be taxed.

Sales tax is horrendously regressive and during a war you will find that things like cakes and biscuits are not actually frivolous at all. We drink a lot of tea.

And windows being covered with bricks for tax reasons.

The window tax features prominently in a visual novel video game (The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles), which also contains a bunch of wildly outlandish historical nonsense and characters like mad-scientist inventors, teleportation devices, and Sherlock Holmes types. I was blown away to learn the window tax was actually a real thing, not something silly just made up for the game.

Taxes were also part of the reason newspapers got so large: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadsheet#History

Fascinating!

And also the reason that houses in Amsterdam are so narrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_the_Netherlands#Arc...

Daylight Robbery [1]

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43805741-daylight-robber...