Never Saw That One Coming

Hahahahahaha.

Electric car owners will have to pay road tax for the first time, as part of ‘eye-watering’ Budget plans designed to fill a £54 billion hole in the public finances.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will use Thursday’s Budget to change Treasury rules which mean emission-free cars and vans currently pay no vehicle excise duty.

The move is designed to plug a projected £7 billion shortfall in road tax as the switch to electric vehicles gathers pace.

Anyone who bought a milk float thinking they would save money on fuelling and VED must be feeling pretty sick right now. With electricity prices rising and now this, any benefits to these anachronisms is now gone. But then, some of us could see this coming. The incentives were always going to be a short term bribe.

But it is likely to prove controversial as it will act as a disincentive to motorists thinking of going green, at a time when soaring energy prices are already undermining the financial case for switching to electric.

They are not green. Nothing about these monstrosities is green. The reality is that in order to make smug middle class people in the developed world feel all good about the lack of emissions, the developing world is losing valuable habitats and children are pressed into slave labour to mine the raw materials for their nice ‘green’ EV.

Mr Hunt yesterday warned that the parlous state of the public finances meant he would have to take a series of ‘eye-watering’ decisions in next week’s Budget.

Well you could try cutting government spending, you obnoxious prick. There’s plenty of opportunity to do so. By cuts, I mean slashing to the bone and beyond.

Mr Hunt said the looming downturn was due largely to Vladimir Putin’s ‘weaponisation’ of gas supplies during his war in Ukraine.

Bollocks. Who was stupid enough to make us dependent on Russian energy supplies? Not Putin.

14 Comments

  1. As the UK is actually exporting North Sea oil and gas, stocks of which are accurately estimated to be around 200 years worth of known reserves, and given the fact we have around 1000 years worth of known coal and shale-gas deposits, there is absolutely no reason to be dependent on any other nation for our energy supplies.

    • Quite right. Let’s get coal going again. We have massive stocks of high quality coal underground.

  2. What they have not said is how much they intend to increase road tax on petrol and diesel to keep the (not) green incentive.

  3. Of course the looming downturn is due not only to successive government’s fantasy driven and irresponsible decisions on energy but also to the lockdowns; the introduction of these was, by a short head in a hotly contested field, the biggest policy blunder during my rather long lifetime. I mean who could possibly have guessed that shutting down the country and paying people not to work would seriously damage the economy? Answer, anyone with a grain of common sense but not, apparently, anyone in government and only a pathetically small number of MPs.

  4. I think of the State as wallpaper. It’s relatively quick and easy to roll another layer of wallpaper out and it looks all pretty and new. But try and roll back the state… there are layers upon layers all stuck down, all resisting steaming and scraping. Think of the Powers That Be as interior designers, flouncing around and insisting that the ‘look’ they create is solely down to their own efforts.

    I regarded BREXIT as an example of rolling back the State – and look how difficult that has been, and continues to be.

  5. “Mr Hunt said the looming downturn was due largely to Vladimir Putin’s ‘weaponisation’ of gas supplies during his war in Ukraine.”

    Bollocks, indeed.

    The looming downturn was caused by our government squandering money trying to beat a virus when it was obvious almost from the start that it was practically impossible. From about April or May, a month or so into the “three weeks to flatten the curve”, anybody looking at the numbers could see that the virus was disproportionately affecting the old and the infirm. Assistance should have been targetted at those vulnerable people while encouraging the rest to return to normal.

    Instead £billions (which we didn’t have) were spent on closing down businesses and paying people not to work. That’s what caused the current inflation. The war in Ukraine is just a handy excuse.

  6. I’ve just bought another petrol car. I couldn’t afford an electric car if i wanted one, which i don’t. Millions like me can’t either. So what happens to us ? I don’t see why we should subsidise rich people, particularly Londoners, to drive these monstrosities.

    • It’s all just a vicious ploy to force the plebs off the road completely by 2050 (if not before), since only the wealthy will be able to afford personal transport and the elect will have their own cars and drivers provided for as “essential to their needs”.

      The only thing we’re missing is the equivalent of Soviet ZiL lanes, but no doubt those will be appearing shortly.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZiL_lane

  7. I live in Devon. My brother-in-law drove down in his EV from London to visit. It took 24 hours plugged into my garage socket to charge him up so that he could get home. Not really practical. (And I still haven’t worked out how much it cost me, either).

  8. I was contemplating all this yesterday while sitting in the bubbly spa at the gym yesterday. The spar overlooks the carpark so I was doing a little research there. Gym membership is moderately expensive so you have to be at least comfortably off to afford it, judging by the car park most members are fairly affluent. Electric cars do seem to be over represented there but by far the most common vehicles there are high end SUVs. There are a couple of Aston Martins and a Lamborghini that I see regularly too. We have a 2012 Ssangyong Korando and a 2016 Hyundai i10, an SUV and a small hatchback. I’m not sure what conclusions you can draw from all this, just a snapshot of the modes of transport chosen by those with enough disposable income to be able to join a private gym.

  9. The countries responsible for sabotaging the NordStream 1 & 2 pipelines to supply gas to Europe are responsible for the weaponising the gas supply, as are the economic sanctions against Russia.
    When the western political cretins wake up to the fact that they and they alone are reponsible for the mess they have got themselves into in which hundreds of millions of people will suffer for, maybe something might be done to go some smallway to resolving these issues. I say small because their intellects are microscopic.

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