Except it isn't in the news - government is trying to bury this

[Freckle]

Was sent the email copied below. If you care about freedom and want to avoid more Big Brother heavy-handedness from this government, sign the petition.

Apparently there is only one month left to register your objection
to the 'Pay as you go' road tax.

The petition is on the 10 Downing St website but they didn't tell
anybody about it. Therefore at this time only 250,000 people had
signed it so far and 750,000 signatures are required to stop them
introducing it.

Once you've given your details (you don't have to give your full
address, just house number and postcode will do), they will send
you an email with a link in it. Once you click on that link, you'll
have signed the petition.

Democracy in action?
The government's proposal to introduce road pricing will mean you
having to purchase a tracking device for your car and paying a
monthly bill to use it. The tracking device will cost about £200
and in a recent study by the BBC, the lowest monthly bill was £28
for a rural florist and £194 for a delivery driver. A non working
mother who used the car to take the kids to school paid £86 in one
month.

On top of this massive increase in tax, you will be tracked.
Somebody will know where you are at all times. They will also know
how fast you have been going, so even if you accidentally creep
over a speed limit in time you can probably expect a Notice of
Intended Prosecution with your monthly bill.

If you care about our freedom and stopping the constant bashing of the car driver, please sign the petition on No 10's new website
(link below) and pass this on to as many people as possible.

petition
Hope you don't mind me sending it

I agree 100% with Aloha and PPH.

personally I think this is a bad move a really bad move. If they want to scrap road tax - great! but put that tax on the petrol that way the more you drive the more you pay. That way you can't dodge it, if you have fuel you already paid it. Do you think they could really cope with every car having this device than managing to charge and bill us accordingly and then what happens if you don't/can't pay because you drove 400 miles to scotland for a holiday? do they come and take your car away? Another recipe for chaos me thinks.

But keeping track of paedophiles and murderers doesn't raise any revenue. You can bet your life that they will ensure this sort of system works, even if they can't be arsed to ensure that the public is safe from criminals.

There was a headline in our local paper last year about how it cost £250 per month to go from one part of the town to another on the bus before 9AM. Some mother or other is campaigning for kids to have discounts on the bus or something, but this bus fare seemed astronomical to me - almost as much as to commute to London every day.

I suppose she ought to be environmentally friendly and send her kid to the sink-school round the corner, leaving the decent school to be frequented by the middle class pupils whose parents can afford to live in walking distance of the decent school.

I believe that its not a tracker as such, but a GPS that just records which roads you have been on. It will only send billing info back and not when , where and what speed. Cant really get that sort of sophistication for £200. (or have I been brain washed??)
They have had about 600,000 signatures or more so far but a govt. official on some radio prog the other day said that its not a very relevant petition as its not an acurate account of what they are actually proposing!!
Asked dhs take on this - he says it will be brilliant as it will keep all the peasants off the road - oh dear. Who am I married to? I think he was joking.....

Doesn't the "surveillance" thing extends to public transport too? I have an Oystercard, which is registered, so my every move, my every trip on the bus or tube, often several a day, is recorded somewhere.

I've noticed if I ever forget to 'touch out' I immediately get this big brother-ish e-mail telling me "You have been charged the highest possible fare for neglecting to touch out at the station at which you exited."

I find that worrying.

Plus there are cameras everywhere in the underground. I sometimes have this half-joking fear that-given the nation's love of voyeuristic televisionLondon Transport will sell the footage, and there will be some programme on channel 5 like Embarassing Moments on The Underground.

And that's my "benign" prediction.

LOL
Can't you buy one that's anonymous? (An oyster card that is)

medea - I know someone who caught her DH being less than honest about where he had been because she surreptitiously swapped oyster cards with him and checked where (and when) he had been!!

surely someone will work out how you can remove the device so you can leave it on your windowsill in the front room whilst you go where the heck you like.

Honestly, the NHS can barely make an appointment by computer but you honestly think that the government will be able to track where everybody is all the time? It isn't going to happen, is it? Have you USED a computer lately? They reboot every ten minutes.

And how is a tracking device going to tell you if you are speeding? I don't see how that can physically work.

Signed Dana Scully

MP - it works by assessing the distance travelled between two set points in any given time. Its basic tracker software. It extrapolates a plot on a map at specific time intervals you see.

i do agree totally that public transport is inadequate and that something ought to be done about it.

on the survailence though, the government can already find out where you're going/what you're doing. In cities there are number plate recognission cameras/and scanners on police cars that know who you are as soon as they scan your number plate. There are cctv cameras in most car parks. There are further cctv cameras in shops/just in the general town centre. If you have a bank account it's possible to find out where you shop/what you buy and for how much. If you have a supermarket loyalty card it's possible to find what you buy and how much and how often. If you have a mobile phone you can be tracked to within 100 metres of where you are. And as you fill in the electoral roll anyone can find out where you live. Even what you post on here isn't anonomous - only today three men were jailed for plotting to rape two young girls over the internet. The evidence was all internet based - they'd never even met. Even if this tracking device is as soffisticated as people seem to think it will be, and tbh for 200 quid I sincerely doubt it will be that soffisticated, it isn't going to give anyone any more info than they can already obtain from other means.

Of course, insurance will plummet and crime will drop to negligible levels because the police will just pinpoint car thieves and getaway cars and have them bang to rights in no time.

Unless a directive to the police to cut costs and save money means they can't afford to give chase because of the Pay-As-You-Go road tax.....

I'm anti-car-use, too (even though I have one - I'm prepared to be penalised for unneccesary use) - but I'm not in favour of this method of dealing with emissions or congestion.

Anyway, wasn' t Blair recently saying that scientists would solve the problems of global warming / emissions? Is using the tax man is his back up plan?

Doesnt have to be sophisticated to send a signal every 2 minutes to a basic hub with a grid reference code. All it is is like a basic recording tom tom but 2 minute intervals not real time.

Very basic.

It will plot your journey like a graph, or a route on a map. Tell you an average speed based on distance travelled over a period of time. So very simple.

But, not difficult to suss this stuff out anyway Wannabe, as you say.

Crikey - you've all seen Google Earth, havent you?

I've just added mine to the 669561 signatures. I'm also quite a greeny but you can't punish people when there's no consistent and sufficient public transport system in place.

Added signature and bumping up.

I believe in green issues, however this government is into tax more than green issues. Are they only wanting the rich to be able to travel at all?

There can be above-board reasons for not wanting all your movements, contacts etc to be traceable, especially electronically.

People in high-risk jobs, for example judges, prison officers and the like, can legally register their cars to work addresses to minimise the risk that a disgruntled ex-client will find them at home.

If the car's movements are all electronically recorded, the risk to those people is increased. Computer records make it easier for an ex-client, or a journalist (or an ex-client posing as a journalist) to bribe a clerk for the information.

192.com has caught out lots of professional people. Many put their real name and address on the electoral register years ago, without any thought of potential risk. They're having to think about it now, since searchimg electronically is so easy.

I also worry about how anyone will be able to maintain necessary professional anonymity, to protect from a genuine risk of harassment or attack, if the ID card scheme goes ahead.

So my vote would be for a tax on mileometer miles. Not worth the extra effort to detect how many are peak/off peak. Weight it to penalise business users so they will put effort into minimising their car use.

and surely it wouldn't be too difficult to add a yearly milometer reading to the MOT, which has to be done anyway?

although what everyone seems to be missing is that it's actually fewer cars we need, not an increasing number of cars used less often. the public transport system needs to be fit to transport the public, which it just isn't right now.

The more I think about it, the more this seems a really bad way to go about things.
It could 'do for' the UK holiday economy - camping (the last remaining option for families on a tight budget) is impossible without a car, many coastal areas are exactly those with minimal or no public transport...and if the extra cost of road tax pushes a holiday up towards the cost of a (ludicrously cheap) charter to the sun, then demand for emission heavy air travel will rise even further.

So many rural and coastal areas rely on holidaymakers for their survival.

My nearest bus stop is 3.5 miles away. I spose I could walk...

Blu thats exactly how i feel re the holidays we barely afford to go camping in our van but surely its better than us going on a plane

Surely there's a pay-as-you-go tax already; tax on fuel. It corresponds to how much you use your car, and it doesn't require a hugely expensive and complicated system to be set up to collect it.

Tbh, if they're prepared to put the money into setting up a scheme like this I think there's another motive; if it was just about discouraging car use and collecting revenue they'd put the tax on petrol.

I wouldn't trust any government further than I could throw them with information on where anyone travelling by car is going.

No wonder it's been kept quiet; we'd surely not collectively fall for this?

i suppose it depends how much you drive. i probably take the car out once a fortnight so at the moment i'm subsidising people who eat up the miles.

I am reassured by the government's experiences with IT developments which ensure that even if they TRY to track you, it'll all go horribly and expensively wrong and won't actually work and tractors in Aberdeen will get my bill while I'll probably get a dry cleaning receipt from the home office.