AWWTM: Budget notes
It’s flattering and frightening that several people told me that they’re looking forward to my thoughts on the budget. So here they are, in a crude and hastily scrawled brain dump. Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…
tax
AWWTM: “Britain pays more for fuel than anywhere else”
It’s another frequently raised fact in comment threads and pub agreements. Everybody knows it’s true. If it wasn’t true, why would everybody know it and repeat it all the time? They can’t all be wrong. You would think though that such a fact, with all of the resources of the […]
AWWTM: “Driving has never cost more”
“End to the war on the motorists? No, driving’s never cost more,” declares Mark King, Money Editor, in The Observer today. To be fair to King, he doesn’t actually say anything as absurd as that driving has “never cost more” in his article — but newspaper headline writers have never […]
AWWTM: The golden age of the motorway
“The great highway will never look empty again.” When they opened, the first motorways were the sparsely populated playgrounds of the privileged few — the few who could afford a car. They could drive as fast as they liked and would never meet a jam. But perhaps they could see […]
AWWTM: I don’t pay road tax
The “I Pay Road Tax” campaign has done an excellent job of reaching out to cyclists. Every cyclist now knows that “road tax” was abolished in the 1930s, that what motorists pay is “vehicle excise duty”, and that VED goes to the treasury and not directly to the highways agencies. […]
Held to ransom
It’s ten years since the Road Haulage Industry blockaded oil refineries to complain about the price of diesel, and the whole country ran out of fuel. At At War With The Motorist I ask what has been since then to reduce our dependence on private motorised transport and road haulage […]
AWWTM: When you start paying road tax…
London’s authorities are to be fined £300 million for failing to prevent the serious air pollution that we’re experiencing. More importantly, an estimated 4-5,000 people will die prematurely this year because of the city’s polluted air. But nobody seems quite able to name the source of the problem. At At […]