Vote Lear
Best of a bad bunch
The point of car tax was always to pay for the maintenance of the roads when it was first introduced well over a hundred years ago. Back then it probably did but last year motorists paid nearly five times more tax than was spent looking after the roads. That is not the half of it. Having a tax disc was supposed to permit you to use the public roads (which included parking). Not content with vastly overcharging for the use of the roads they had the bright idea of further fleecing motorists with fuel duty, because they could. In case no one could afford to drive their cars any more they introduced parking charges that are nothing short of obscene. The meters in Kingston cost £1 for 20 minutes now, that is not much less than the minimum wage. Having paid five times over the odds for vehicle tax and been ripped off left right and centre you would think that we would be entitled to use the things but ohh no, there is now a congestion charge and an increasing trend towards toll roads that you have to pay to use. If you can’t afford all this? I saw an advert on the telly the other day that if you have an untaxed car on the road they are entitled to crush it. The ba*tards would as well.
They have now changed the tax rules to penalise ‘gas guzzling Chelsea tractors’ but the roads are in such a crap state that you almost need a four wheel drive to use them and that’s without the added ‘benefit’ of speed ramps on just about every other road that are hugely ecologically unsound and of questionable safety value.
If public transport were affordable then there might just conceivably be some justification for the charges, but it costs well nearly fifteen quid to take the train from Claygate to London and you won’t get much change from two thousand pounds for a season ticket. Buses are somewhat better value for short journeys if you have an oyster card but then any government agency that doesn't like the cut of your jib can track all your movements.
The solution? It is simply not feasible to hand back all the ill-gotten gains to motorists. Governments cost money to run. Almost certainly nowhere near as much as the current one costs but we need a health service, an army, a police force, social security, an infrastructure.. and this involves the necessary evils of tax and a system to collect it. Handing the purloined billions back to the motorist would just mean it had to come from somewhere else.
I would like to see a law passed forbidding local governments from imposing speed ramps without a full consultation and the explicit agreement of the majority of local residents but this is not the main issue. Public transport should be in public hands. Why add an extra tier of expense? The trains are a monopoly because you can’t have every Tom Dick and Harry laying track wherever they like and monopolies should never be sold because then they come into the possession of accountants in grey suits that milk them for every penny they are worth rather than looking at the bigger picture. I would be in favour of renationalising the railways.