I read in the paper today (Sunday Times 3/4/05) that the government are conducting secret trials in South Yorkshire to test the technology that will enable them to introduce a charge for each mile a motorist drives. The suggestion is that we could eventually find ourselves receiving a monthly bill for our road-use, and that costs would vary between 1p a mile and a wopping £1.40 a mile depending which roads and what time of day.
They will achieve this either by photographing our number-plates as we drive past, or by using GPS satellite technology, or by forcing us to install a little beacon in our cars that would send signals to roadside receivers.
For the life of me I cannot understand how they DARE even to think about this, let alone trial it as a serious proposal.
We own our cars. We buy the petrol (and pay a ridiculous amount of money to the government in the process). We pay our car tax for the right to use the car on the road. And we own the roads - they were built with public money, they are public property, and we ARE the public! If a private company built a road, I wouldn't mind paying to drive on it, but why the hell should we pay anything to anyone to drive our own cars on our own roads?
They claim this is just a measure to cut congestion. They can't be bothered to spend our money on building us bigger and better roads, or provide us with efficient public transport, so they're going to force us off the roads by imposing extra taxation. Nice.
I note also one or two rather sad and disturbing facts. One is that they were able to find 450 motorists in South Yorkshire who were willing to install the little spy-boxes in their cars so the government could follow them around. Who are these sad and deluded motorists? What the hell do they think they are doing, and who do they think is going to gain by their collusion? If they think they will, they're in for a nasty disappointment!
And secondly, the proposal to levy these charges comes from what the Sunday Times calls "an expert group" including civil servants (whose departments will grow bigger and more powerful with the task of collecting all this extra tax, which won't do their seniority and salaries any harm), environmentalists (who'd like to see us all lie down and die so we don't interfere with the trees and the little foxy-woxies) and …. wait for it …. representatives of motoring organisations!
Can anyone tell me who these representatives were, and which organisations they represent? Because I think I'd like to discuss with them their betrayal of the people whose interests they should be protecting. One of them, I strongly suspect, is the RAC Foundation whatever that is. I wonder if it's anything like the AA Trust which distinguished itself recently by repeating the lie that the majority of accidents are caused by excessive speed, a falsehood so old and discredited that even the government no longer use it.
When I started this website I told myself that I wasn't going to use it to promote the interests of any other person or organisation, but would just moan generally, indiscriminately and in all directions. But the more I read and hear and think about the way we treat our motorists (and let's face it, most of us are motorists at some time or another) I come to the conclusion that there is only one organisation that genuinely has at its heart the motorist's interests and nothing else. It's called the Association of British Drivers. But don't take my word for it - go to their website, see what they say, and decide for yourself.
One last thing. The government put £2 billion of OUR MONEY aside to help cities that wanted to introduce their own systems of road pricing like Foxy Ken's ludicrous Congestion Charge. Recently the good people of Edinburgh voted in a referendum and rejected the idea. Since then Bristol and Southampton have had second thoughts, and there is currently no town anywhere in the UK introducing such a scheme. What a brilliant outcome that is! Why can't the government listen to what ordinary people are telling them? (Answers on a very small piece of paper, please, preferably including the words "because they're a bunch of w*nk*rs").
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