POST-BUDGET THOUGHTS

It has been a few days since my last entry and the Budget has been and gone, giving me time to collate some thoughts on what has come to pass. The owners of gas-guzzler vehicles were taxed to the hilt as expected and used as scapegoats for all that is wrong with our environment, whilst Blue Chip oil companies who are responsible for the fact that we are all still using their products to run our vehicles have received a two percent cut in Corporation Tax... that seems fair to me. NOT!

Oil companies are predominantly responsible for preventing new fuel-saving technology from ever reaching the market place. They have spent many years buying up Patents and designs to prevent technology that would have weakened their stranglehold on the market place from getting further than the drawing board. NASA sent men to the Moon using fuel cell technology forty years ago, yet we still cannot transplant that technology into a modern motor vehicle because of supposed astronomic production costs. I am obviously very thick because I cannot for the life of me understand what it is that makes a Hydrogen Fuel Cell so expensive to produce, particularly on the scale required to support the manufacture of motor vehicles. The only reason I can find for it is that the global economy that thrives on how many barrels of crude oil are sold each day would collapse overnight from the sudden loss of revenue. Governments would fall and a New World Order would arise where the oil baron held no sway, and America was no longer the voice of the planet.

On a slightly different tack but still looking at "Green" Gordons' Red Box of Surprises, it seems to me that a chance was missed to really make a difference to our environment and tax something that has no place in the modern world... the humble, indestructible, non-biodegradeable, plastic carrier bag. There is no excuse for anybody going shopping to come home with armfuls of carrier bags. It is high time that the bloody things were made illegal and people went back to using proper canvas bags that last a lifetime. Start charging a Pound for every plastic carrier bag that leaves a shop and everyone will start to think twice about using the damn things. I shudder to think of how much of our valuable landfill space is full of plastic bags that will never degrade, or how many plastic bags are burnt in local authority incinerators every day adding to the general atmospheric pollution.

So here we are. Next year it is going to cost me an extra Two Hundred Pounds to tax the car, and an extra Fifty Pounds in increased fuel duty to add to the Twelve Hundred Pounds combined(approximately) that I already pay the Government of this glorious nation every year for the priveledge(!) of owning a car. Gordon, if you're reading this I would just like to let you know on behalf of the car owning public that you're taking the F***ing Piss!

VEHICLE EXCISE DUTY - A FAIRER WAY?

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.