MOTOR-BLOG from Coventry

Hooray for the truckers! (except the one who was overtaking that other one on the A14 tonight for about 4 miles and held me up of course…) but what can we really do about fuel prices? OK, so driving a few lorries into central London, will balls things up a little bit, but I say MORE, MORE MORE!

The Government has made it ILLEGAL to blockade the petrol depots like happened last time (democracy in action for you) but there must be something else we can do. You may have received the around robin email as I have, which suggests that boycotting certain brands of petrol will help - I think it was BP and Shell, but I may be wrong.

This of course is ridiculous - all this will do is put individual petrol stations out of business (which are run on the whole by individual franchisees making only about 2p profit on each litre of fuel sold), and if they go bust all we’ll be left with is less filling stations and more overpriced flats built on their sites. The email also suggested that we get our fuel from supermarkets instead - madness especially with the amount of profit these organisations make.

So what can we do? Well we can demand that the Government doesn’t charge VAT on top of the tax they already put on fuel. Why don’t they charge VAT on the unit price of fuel and then levy the extra fuel tax on top? OK so it won’t reduce the price massively but it would help. But of course they don’t want that, as high fuel prices are a GREEN measure aren’t they? But that’s rubbish as we all know - despite high fuel prices, demand has not faltered putting pay to the ‘make it expensive and people will find alternative ways of travel’ strain of thought.

I’ve just looked up a standard day return from Coventry to London on the train and it’s £107 (unless you want to leave at stupid times) Rubbish. What’s the cheap green alternative? There isn’t one. All that high fuel prices are doing is making my Nan find it difficult to buy food and pay the bills, rather than stopping people using their cars. Poor people are suffering - people who can afford to buy Porsche Cayenne Turbo’s and other pointless vehicles can afford to pay the extra cost of fuel - poor people cannot.

We must do something about climate change I agree, but we also must do something about racketeering and profiteering Governments too. I’m not suggesting that any other party would do anything differently but we must do something about this situation. When I was in Spain, the petrol cost about as much per litre in Euros as we pay in pounds - so why should we pay as much as we do?

I wouldn’t mind paying more if public transport wasn’t privatised and the extra money went to provide cheap reliable public transport, but of course this is not the case. In Spain the maximum we paid on a bus was 1 Euro, and the train from the airport to Malaga City centre only cost 1 Euro 20 cents. If they can provide cheap, clean, reliable public transport and still charge 30% less for a litre of fuel - then why the hell can’t we?

Another new year is with us, so we all know what that means… the same as it is every year at this time and for the last gawd knows how many years before. I am of course talking about above inflation price rises on our ‘public’ transport system.

I say ‘public’ as it is about as public as our public schools, i.e. not at all. It’s one of the biggest scandals that we continue to ignore in this country - it’s up there with paying tax on a litre of petrol, then paying VAT on top of the original tax. It’s positively disgusting and I can’t for the life of me think of another product where the tax we pay is taxed again - can you? If you can I’d like to know about what it is and more than that - why?

We are accused as private car drivers of killing the environment, causing pollution and congestion and generally being all around villains, and this is when aviation fuel is not taxed at all, and the largest amount of ‘personal’ or ‘private’ CO2 emissions each year is not from our cars at all, but from our houses. 

We don’t hear or see our Politicians ever mentioning this or passing legislation to make sure all of these horrid, small, badly built flats popping up everywhere have solar water heating or wind turbines on do we? Ever heard of a Jet aircraft or diesel loco fitted with catalytic converters? Ok so cats can’t be fitted to jet ‘planes but it illustrates a point, cars and modern cars in particular are actually very clean compared to houses, aircraft and trains.

If the Government really wants to cut down on congestion and pollution it should concentrate on sorting out some of the UK’s dreadful junctions - Catthorpe interchange which I have to endure everyday yes I’m talking about you. But cutting congestion by sorting out badly designed and cheaply built intersections costs money doesn’t it? Congestion charging raises revenue. Need I say any more?

For those who’d keenly point out that the London Congestion charge goes back into the public transport system I’d like to say this: does it really? Our ‘public’ transport systems are run by private corporations which, surprise surprise seem to make record profits year on year and yet still benefit from our taxes.

How can our money be used to fund profit making private businesses while fares rise above inflation year on year to fund ‘improvement work’ to ‘our public transport system’. Can’t these improvements be funded by the massive profits made by those who run our essential services which aren’t ours in any way shape or form?

It’s disgusting, and I’d say it’s immoral too. Sorry to go all Commie on you here, but I say nationalise all transport systems in the UK right now and make them all non-profit making. Then you would know that the tax you pay really is going to where it should and not straight into the pockets of the shareholders of foreign owned multi nationals which as far as I can tell is exactly where these new fare increases will go.

Am I wrong? Possibly. Is it more complicated than that? Probably again, but I can’t for the life of me see why it can’t be this simple. Please give us all affordable, clean, real public transport if you want us all to use our cars less. I for one refuse to pay £1.50 to travel on the bus into town when it takes so long, while buses are so filthy and while they are so dangerous - no seat belts on buses are there? Why not?

No thanks, I’ll keep on using my car which is cheaper, cleaner, safer and more reliable until nationalisation comes in and all bus journeys are capped at 75p and rail fares have a maximum £20 fare at any time of day. I think that this is reasonable and these are the prices we should be paying, especially if the Government really wants us to use the buses and trains and not our lovely, warm, clean and safe cars. Happy new year!