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 thought that 'pay as you go' driving was being introduced to cut congestion not pollution (although of course that will be a nice knock on effect)

I live in the SE and there is no way the roads can handle anymore car growth. I don't know what the solution is.

Does anyone know what the figures are for cars entering central London pre- and post-congestion charge?

The problem is that you can't actually stop people needing to use the roads at peak times. All you can do is charge them more for the privilege.

The 'unnecessary' journeys here would not be priced off the road. Most of us in the SE/London have to pay at least 50p parking even to visit a local shop or to drop off the kids at nursery. A 10p road price charge is not going to discourage this use.

What it will do is disproportionately hit those on low incomes anyway who need to use a car because of mobility issues. And any attempt to mitigate this by a reduction will just be hugely bureacratic and abused.

Complicated systems are always bad and subject to fraud. The simpler the better. THe advantage of petrol tax is that it is very difficult to evade. If you buy petrol, you pay it. It doesn't matter if you are in the black economy or unregistered.

Perhaps everyone could have a free allowance to start with?

Here, here, Unquiet!

DH is in the same boat.

MANY people, in increasing numbers, can no longer afford to live near hteir place of work, either.

Opportunities for employment sufficient to cover survival costs are often located in cities where cost of living is little short of exorbitant, making it impossible for families to live near their work.

So let's penalise them for trying to make a living and not depending on the state to do it for htem!

Yeah, that's a great motivator to keep people from considering just sodding hte whole thing and moving abroad!

Even my own FIL says, 'If I were young and had a trade, I'd turn my back on this place in a heartbeat.'

In principal, I hate this proposal. It just might tip me over the edge to move closer to public transport and ditch the car.

However, part of me thinks go for it Tony (or should I say Gordon because this proposal smells very much like a Grodon Brown idea) because I think one more tax is one step closer to Prime Minister Cameron. So, do it Gordon. Do it do it do it.

If we ever won hte Lotto, we're moving to the Continent.

But Uwila, once it's introduced, Cameron will keep it even if he is elected.

A bit like council tax. The tories introduced it, the Labour party jumped up and down about it, but once they were in power, did they get rid of it? No of course not. And the Tories won't get rid of unpopular laws the Labour party introduces either.

Of course he will. Council tax, and tuition fees, and the Dome. All Tory initiatives absorbed by Labour.

They did eventually take Railtrack back - for financial reasons, or because of all the accidents? - but that's the only un-doing of bad Tory policy that springs to mind.

Well I think's more likely that Cameron will cut taxes than Brown. But, I guess that a bit like saying you are more likely to water in the North Sea than in the Sahara.

blimey 678,000 have signed it! obviously a strong point is being across

Upper middle class Americans virtually always prefer the Tories. Tory policies relate much more closely to what they are used to back home - even the Democrats aren't really socialist, socialism isn't a serious option in American politics.

Thank God for that. (that there aren't many socialists in America)

You would have got on like a house on fire with Mrs Thatcher at her peak, uwila ("no such thing as society")

Amen to that, Uwila, and thank God there aren't many upper middle class Republicans in my town

You won't be surprised to find out that you are not the first MNer to make that oservation.

Given that even the feasibility study concluded that there was absolutely no chance of national road pricing being technologically possible before 2014 at the earliest, it's rather unlikely that Gordon Brown will be doing anything of the sort.

"If you care about freedom and want to avoid more Big Brother heavy-handedness from this government, sign the petition"

pmsl

freedom to do what exactly?

not to breathe polluted air?

not to have your kid mained or killed by a speeding car?

not to have your kids inherit a rather warm world?

And WHY do people always think that the govenerment gives a stuff about people's indvidual movements ? Like theres a secret govt department of tracking "ooh there goes Mrs Jones, just dropped the kids at school, now off to buy 2 boxes of lean cuisine on 2 for 1 I'll wager...Mrs Smith on the way to aerobics...you'd think she'd learn, wouldn't you..."

I don't really get why people get so het up about road pricing. We ration almost all goods in western societies through prices. So not everyone can afford everything, and we live with that. For some goods (like healthcare) we take the view that wealth shouldn't be a determining factor in access, so they are made free at the point of delivery. It was fine to do that for roads when road space wasn't a scarce resource. But now it is, as is parking space. Also, car drivers don't pay for all the "externalities" as economists call them - the bad effects their behaviour has on everyone else.

I think the incentives in Britain for people that already have cars are perverse. For example, if I want to visit my parents in Leeds from London, I can pay a 75 pound train fare or buy 40 pounds worth of petrol and drive. If more than one person is travelling, the difference is even more stark. That's just insane. If we are trying to discourage car use, either the train should be cheaper, or they should be charging me to use the M1.

None of us likes to pay more for things, but in some senses, that's just tough luck. It's either that or get used to journeys taking longer and longer, and the air getting dirtier and dirtier. Which maybe people prefer and we should let it happen, who knows. I think I read somewhere that the M6 toll is basically empty while the M6 next to it is snarled up because no-one will pay the 3 quid to use the toll road and they would rather sit in traffic. Is that true. Dunno.

No easy answers maybe?

I agree with Aloha completely.

This is an erosion of privacy rights! We already have this country covered in CC cameras to track our every move, we have ID cards coming and now we have this coming.

This govt has made us the most watched nation in Europe!

You may have nothing to hide, the vast majority of people have nothing to hide, so why does the need to monitor the minority mean the majority needs monitoring!

As for tax....we already have a significant and increasing tax burden! where is it going? where is the improved services? where is the better education? where is the better healthcare!!

This is yet another tax on the vast majority of the working middle class in this country who are seen as a limitless pocket for the govt. They tax us as much as we can when we work , destroy our pensions and take the little we have let to give to our kids as inheritance and I for one have had enough!

Roll on the next election!!

No, I'd get shot. Do as told. Do as told. Do as told.

Yes that is true about the M6 toll road, Tech - it's £4 each way now though, so £40 a week of taxed income if you used it every day (preferable to stewing in a jam I'd have thought, but not an option for people on limited incomes)

re your Leeds-London train fare, we booked one for DS1 recently that was only £20 one-way if booked in advance but shot up to nearly £100 the day before. I don't think other countries' train fares operate in such a lunatic fashion.

Charging us more to drive is OK in theory, as long as the money is ploughed into public transport rather than general government spending, but the concept of road pricing sucks. People often don't have a choice over when and where they drive, so loading the price of fuel is a much fairer way.

Now I know why they won't use your annual mileage from the MOT....

A friend of a friend was telling me of one of his friends who was forced to use a car with a tracking device on it as part of his work for a government department. A speeding fine came through the post because they had calculated his average speed on part of the journey and it was slightly above the speed limit.

...So on top on the road charging, you'll also have to pay a speeding fine if you go slightly over the limit.