an innocent guide to Copenhagen

The planet's doomed right? It's time to pack the tinned goods and head north. Well not just yet, but we are definitely in last chance territory to keep our climate in a more friendly condition. World leaders will be gathering in Copenhagen this December to try and secure a crucial international agreement for significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. There's a bit more information from our Sustainability Jess about why this is all so important on our new innocent guide to Copenhagen page.

Jess will be visiting the Department of Energy and Climate Change in November to meet Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Ed Miliband will be attending the Copenhagen meeting so we thought we'd ask him some questions about the meeting, the UK position and climate change. If you have a question you'd like Jess to ask Ed then complete the form here and we'll pick the five most popular questions for Ed to answer. This guy is important in getting the deal we need in Copenhagen, so it should be interesting to hear what he has to say.

Want do even more yourself? Then check out this site.

not tonight, Darling...

Back in March, we were told that the government weren't going to be taking VAT off fruit juice and smoothies when Alistair Darling came out outside to wave his briefcase.

Just in case we hadn't got the message, they also said 'No' to our petition to drop this silly tax (as 22,045 of you who signed up will already know from the rather standard email No. 10, Downing Street sent last week)

Don't worry though. Like Madonna, we're not ready to chuck in the towel just yet. We've drafted a stiff letter to Mr. Darling, copying in Mr. Brown, to let them know just what we think of their response.

As ever, we'll keep you posted.

no news can be good news (sometimes)

So we've been waiting a while to find out what the government was going to do in this budget. This time last year, they said (buried deep in the small print) that they'd look into 'modernising and clarifying VAT legislation' on non-alcoholic drinks. And 20,000 of you kindly signed a petition to say you think it's a bit odd to tax healthy juices and smoothies, when all sorts of other food is zero-rated.

If any of you are experts in reading budget reports, we'd love to see if they did say anything about taxing juices and smoothies. But we don't think they did. This weekend Vince Cable announced in his speech that he thought it might be a good idea to tax a little bit more on alcohol, and use that money to pay for a reduction in tax on juice. We definitely heard the bit in the budget speech today about pints costing more. But we didn't hear Mr Darling say anything about spending that money on encouraging people to get more fruit on board. Maybe he'll announce that another day. In the meantime, thanks to all of you for helping us with our petition. And don't worry. We haven't given up just yet...

intruder at number 10

Richard was invited to sit in the Cabinet Room at Number 10 Downing Street yesterday, to talk about business. He said it was good and that there were free Fox's Glacier Mints for all.

gordon doesn't deliver the goods

We don't get disappointed often, but we have to say that we're very disappointed to see that Mr Brown, aka the Chancellor, has not reduced VAT on fruit juices to 5% in his latest budget. We and our drinkers have been campaigning for a year for this simple step which would lead to over 500 million more portions of fruit being consumed each year in the UK. Two thirds of people are still not getting their five a day and we think it’s madness to tax something healthy like fruit juice at 17.5% (sold in supermarkets), especially when this tax isn't applied to hot dogs and pizzas sold in the same shop.

Good news in the budget included a whole host of incentives for the environment, from biofuels to efficient cars and zero carbon homes. But there was little to encourage the health of our nation. As well as lower VAT on juices, we would have liked to have seen free, healthy school meals for all primary school children. A trial in Hull has seen a 90% take up of these healthy lunches and a real change in the behaviour and performance of those kids. But there evidently wasn't enough money left in that red briefcase to help out the rest of the nation's young people. Ho hum.

write to your MP

A couple of things about our campaign to get rid of VAT on smoothies:

1. The story made it into the FT this weekend. It's gathering speed.

2. If you feel strongly about it, you can go to www.writetothem.com , find your local MP and send them a note. Or indeed send them a note about whatever is bothering you the most - late buses, wonky town hall clock, lack of good discos in your constituency. Use the power of democracy, today.

Thanks to Gil, who let us know about www.writetothem.com via our blog comments.

VAT is rubbish - discuss

Here's the question: is it right for smoothies and juices to be taxed, when most other food isn't?

Obviously, as makers of fresh fruit drinks, we're a little biased. At present, we're trying to work out how a government that encourages people to eat five portions of fruit and veg a day can still charge 17.5% tax on 100% pure fruit juices. It doesn't make sense.

Go to the supermarket today and you don't need to pay VAT on the vast majority of food and drink (for the benefit of non-UK readers, VAT = sales tax). That means a 0% VAT rate is applied to all "essential" foods whether it's doughnuts, frozen chips, meat pies or beefburgers. Yet all "beverages" are taxed at 17.5% - classed as non-essential, beverages are exceptions to the zero-rate that's applied to food.

More here in our Guardian column, but the question remains - should you have to pay VAT on our drinks? Are beverages non-essential? Feel free to comment...