Gavin Green blogs on why Gordon Brown’s carbon tax system is wrong, and offers a simple, honest solution that is probably far too straightforward to ever be adopted.
If Gordon Brown really is the honest tell-it-as-it-is politician he pretends to be, he should admit to highway robbery and change his name to Dick Turpin. Stand and deliver!
Barely another week passes without a new motoring tax. We now have carbon-related road tax, carbon parking tax, carbon company car tax and soon carbon congestion charges and carbon showroom tax. It is all to make a world a greener, healthier place, or so Grumpy Gordon and his Highwaymen tell us.
Well if Grumpy Gordon is serious about cutting car carbon emissions, there is only one true solution. Buying a car does not produce carbon, so why punish the purchaser of a big Range Rover (who also boosts the UK economy and guarantees UK manufacturing and design jobs) over the buyer of a little Renault? Parking does not produce CO2 (ironically the only car that produces carbon when parked is an electric vehicle, as it recharges from the National Grid) so why punish a kerbside Porsche over a parked Prius? Frugal cars block the roads just as badly as gas guzzlers, so why confuse congestion with carbon?
The current incredibly complicated carbon-linked car taxes are full of obfuscation, confusion and dishonesty. There is one – and only one – way of fairly charging us for emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. Tax the price of fuel. The more fuel we burn, the more CO2 we produce. It really is as simple as that.
The Ferrari buyer who does only 3000 miles a year is more environmentally friendly than the Fiat buyer who does 12,000 miles a year. But the current car tax system does not reflect this. A fuel tax-only system does. The family who own a big MPV and regularly fill it with five people are more environmentally friendly than another family with three small cars, who make three times as many journeys. The current car tax system does not reflect this. A fuel tax-only system does. It also encourages us to ‘go green’ in our choice of car, the overarching aim.
Of course we already pay an obscene amount of fuel tax and, not so many years ago, there were demonstrations and petrol station blockages when the price of fuel neared £1 a litre (oh happy days!). This is why Grumpy Gordon doesn’t do the sensible thing and simply tax fuel.
But if carbon emissions really are the threat to our planet that he keeps telling us, fuel tax is the most efficacious solution. Apart, of course, from giving the poor motorist a break, and instead taxing empty office blocks where the lights are left on all night and taxing aircraft fuel and taxing energy inefficient homes and taxing coal power stations – but these are surely measures far too sensible for a gang of Highwaymen to adopt.
To read more of Gavin Green’s blog click here