Our new Wanker of the Week is Alistair Darling, the transport secretary.
He has let it be known that he intends to press ahead with plans to introduce road charging in an attempt to reduce congestion. This will mean that those of us who drive mostly on rural roads (like me) will have to pay 2p a mile for the privilege, while you poor sods who live in cities will pay as much as £1.34 at certain times of day on certain roads.
He sweetens the pill by promising to remove fuel duty and road tax. Yeah, right - we'll believe that when we see it.
While reducing congestion on the roads is important and highly desirable, Al earns his place on this distinguished page by failing to realise that …
• these are our roads he's proposing to charge us for, built for us with our money. How would he like it if I knocked on his door and asked him to pay £5 to use his own driveway?
• very few of us drive about just for the hell of it. We work, we get the kids to school, we visit our elderly parents, we go to the doctor's, we need to go shopping or we can't eat … Most of us don't just get in our cars and thrash round the countryside for kicks. Failing an effective and comprehensive public transport system, we need to drive. I live in the country - I know. Yet Al, in his wisdom, is trying to force us off the roads and turn the clock back fifty years.
• it will be socially divisive. The rich will afford to drive, and the poor won't. And he calls himself a Labour politician?
• the technology to place a black box in my old car and then track it by satellite doesn't exist yet, not in a practical form. And the government's track record with new nationwide technology isn't too good, is it? If they can't make the Passport Office or the Child Support Agency work, how are they going to manage 30 million cars? Get real!
• though we'd all be delighted to be spared fuel duty and road tax, many of us are likely to find that being spied upon by the government is too high a price to pay. Why should Alistair Darling know where and when I'm travelling? Will I know when and where he's driving to?
• it will do little to cut pollution. On the contrary, those of us who drive cars that use a lot of petrol will find it much easier if fuel duty is removed. Suits me - I have an old Mercedes and only get 20 to the gallon. In any case, recent figures show that transport accounts for only 18% of harmful atmospheric emissions, with cars contributing only a tiny proportion of that figure; the real culprits are diesel trains and, particularly, aircraft. What's Al doing about them?
• after the General Election, the government said they'd listen a bit more carefully in future. Apparently Al was somewhere else that day - he seems to be intending to carry on in the same old way and impose on the nation a solution that we haven't agreed to, which some of us will fight tooth and nail to prevent, and which won't work.
Fortunately, we all know that the whole scheme is just pie in the sky. There are too many things to go wrong, and I take malicious pleasure in hoping that they do, indeed, go wrong in the most spectacular fashion.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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