Pitiful growth forecasts will tempt Reeves to impose sin taxes on everything from a can of coke to a holiday, says James Price

I’ve previously called the Chancellor Reeves the Roundhead in these pages, in honour of her fun-killing ways. But she’s not the first Chancellor to tax having a good time.

A tax designed to disincentivise behaviour, or at least recoup the perceived costs of that behaviour, is known as a Pigouvian tax, and they are used today on everything from cigarettes, alcohol and sugar to fuel duties and even the blasted payment for plastic bags in shops.

There come points where these sorts of taxes become self-defeating, as all taxes do. In Britain today, this is increasingly true of various ‘sin’ taxes – or fun taxes, as I’d rather we called them.

The most heavily taxed are the original target of sin taxes –........

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