After a protracted court case between food giant Procter and Gamble and HM Revenue and Customs, it has been decided, once and for all, that Pringles are crisps. This won't come as a surprise to anyone who's ever eaten Pringles - AKA 'crack in a cardboard tube' - which look, taste, sound and feel like pretty much any other preservative laden fried starch - but it's a nicety of taxonomy that's going to cost P&G quite a lot of money.

As you may remember, a High Court judge ruled only last summer that the Pringle, containing as it does less than 50% potato matter and formed into an entirely artificial shape, does not constitute a crisp - which would attract VAT. It was, the judge ruled, more akin to a cake or bread which, as a general foodstuff is zero rated. This ruling has now been overturned and P&G look set to face a gigantic tax bill to the tune of somewhere over £100m.

Stop giggling at the back … this isn't funny.



There's quite a history of products having to argue to defend their status. In 2006 there was an undignified spat when it was realised that Budweiser, brewed from rice rather than malt and hops didn't meet the German Reinheitsgebot purity standards sufficiently to be called beer. More recently McVitie's biscuits have successfully argued that the Jaffa Cake is indeed a zero rated 'cake', rather than a taxable chocolate covered biscuit - are you still following this?

Let's leave aside the stupendous idiocy of this argument for a moment and just revel in the irony: a huge food processor going to court to publicly and expensively assert that their product is artificial, lacking in natural ingredients and utterly mucked-about with. The fact that they eventually lose and still have to pay a fortune is just too delicious. Is it possible to spontaneously combust from schadenfreude?

What's your verdict though? Is the Pringle a vital foodstuff from which our government has no right to extract a screw? Or is it a filthy indulgence, a manufactured monstrosity for which we should justifiably be taxed?