Gordon Brown's alleged plans to tax 4x4's and gas-guzzling cars off the road are a complete travesty. It is apparently only going to affect some 225,000 motorists so what precisely is the Government expecting to gain from this ridiculous plan? Added to this is the photograph on page4 of The Times(20/03/2007) showing a woman holding a placard saying "no 4x4's on the school run". The amount of such vehicles on the school run is minimal in comparison to the amount of vehicles that are actually on school runs in the first instance, and Gordon Brown is the idiot who made it cheaper for families to own a second vehicle with which to do the school run by reducing the excise duty on smaller cars. It is these vehicles that clog up our roads on a twice daily basis, polluting the atmosphere and bringing our town centres to a standstill at a time when people are trying to get to work. It is a pleasure to drive during school holidays when the school runners are off the road and the normal daily congestion is non-existent. It is these vehicles that need to be taxed off the road and then this generation of couch potato children who can't walk any further than the car would have to learn to use their feet and walk to school.
We already have a system of taxation that charges us for the amount of fuel that we use in our cars and it charges us at the point of purchase in the fuel station. Approximately 90pence in every pound that we spend on petrol/diesel is passed on to the Treasury in some form or another. The vehicle excise duty as it exists should be scrapped altogether and replaced with a much fairer system of taxation. For example, introduce a personal annual mileage allowance. Is it fair that somebody who uses a Range Rover to drive 6000 miles a year should pay twice the amount for a Road Fund Licence as somebody who drives 35000 miles a year in a Vauxhall Vectra? No it isn't. MOT testing stations already log vehicle mileage so it wouldn't be difficult for the DVLA to use this data in tracking vehicle mileage for excise purposes. Mileage allowances could be purchased in blocks of 1000 miles and paid for through the network of pay points that we use to pay for telephone credit or gas credit, and the beauty is that nearly every fuel station has a pay point machine behind the counter. Any imbalance in our mileage allowances could be paid for prior to a new MOT certificate being issued and everybody is squared off and happy. It would probably save the DVLA some money as well because half the pen-pushers at Swansea wouldn't be needed anymore. We could then use the redundant office space by converting it into flats to help relieve the so-called housing shortage in this country.
I wonder how many of the 225,000 vehicle owners that will be affected by this taxation plan of Brown's will be voting Labour at the next General Election? Not many, I'll warrant. I know that I wont be voting Labour anymore and for a Government that has fallen 15points behind in recent polls that loss of votes could be the final nail in the coffin that buries this Government and consigns it to the pages of History. I have said in other places that I believe Gordon Brown is unfit to govern as Prime Minister and there is more proof of it with every day that passes. I don't see him turning down the use of a ministerial gas-guzzling Jaguar to make the short trip from Downing Street to the Houses of Parliament every day, but I guess that is what Politics is all about; Rhetoric and Hypocrisy.
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