Safe Speed Forums

Sorry...

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

Another protest taking place at the Stanlow Oil Refinery near Ellsmere Port Tonight.

To me, it's been obvious for some time that with the rapidly rising fuel prices (of any kind) in the future, that our taxation levels on fuels are increasingly unsustainable. Cheap fuel has gone forever and these 300% levels of fuel tax must become a thing of the past. If we need money to pay for a civilised society then we need to move the tax burden elsewhere.........

Now the unemployed and the low paid can't pay any more. The rich? simply won't!.......... That leaves us in the middle.

Work it out for yourselves where we're headed ........... It doesn't make any difference who's in power.

Except that one will try to prevent it, and the other: will revel in it......

Well, the unemployed could become un-unemployed and at least then they wouldn't be a burden on the state.

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

Or the state could employ another million public servants, to go with the over-800,000 they've employed in the last ten years.
Still, at least the [over] 4 million "we" employ to do our bidding work for low wages....well, their 25% deductions means they effectively do...
Then we could take account of the large amount of "partner agencies" that also employ people [paid for by taxation and other levies].
Then we could add-in the various "charitable trusts", who we also pay for. In one way or another.

So, compared to the 8 million or so who are dependent on the state [us] for their daily bread, and who earn a very good salary from that parasitism, do the hard-core unemployed really cost that much ?
I mean, nobody is going to live well on £60.74/week jobseekers allowance. Bearing in mind that in most cases the "fringe benefits" (housing benefit, mortgage relief, council-tax-benefit, free-prescriptions, free-dental-care) do not materialise for 6 months.....and in many cases will not materialise ever
Strangely enough, public spending is higher (pound-wise) now than ten years ago, but as a percentage of national income it is lower.
While the much criticised national dept is lower as well....although rising.

Still, everybody needs a dog to whip ...........

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

I can't believe the ignorance of people organising and attending such protests.

Fuel is becoming more expensive because of the economics of supply and demand. The only way it's going to become any cheaper is if people lower their usage!

Overall the Government makes a loss on road transport, (along with public transport, alcohol and smoking). Further subsidy will only result in more tax elsewhere unless the Government finds a way to become far more efficient (oink oink flap flap). Fuel protests are selfish and will achieve nothing.

Thanks,

Nick (accepts the fact he'll have to pay more for his 300 miles or so of driving each week or quit his Saturday job and travel less; ideally hopes for a cheap 24/7 public transport service that probably won't happen either)

Bollocks

Seriously, you can't claim NHS costs as that's paid by the car insurance companies, you can't claim road maintenance as that's significantly less than what they make from road tax alone. You can't claim policing as that's pretty much entirely cameras these days and they make a profit.

And that isn't even taking into account the economic benefits of having roads, try factoring that into the figures.

You're right that cutting fuel tax will just lead to more taxes elsewhere, but that's because the government is hopelessly inefficient, is pissing money away into badly thought out PFI "initiatives" that are going to bleed us dry for years to come, is fighting a pointless war that nobody gives a crap about any more and is creating thousands of "make work" civil service jobs to get the headline unemployment figures down, even though it costs more to pay one of these newly employed people than it would've done if they'd just stayed on the dole and claimed benefits.

I don't really have an issue if people who are just trying to get to work object to subsidising all that crap


I don't even pay for my fuel and the current price is causing me a problem. I buy it and then claim it back from head office, currently I'm spending more on fuel than I actually earn in a month, I've had to get a special credit card just for fuel purchases, plus the increasing cost of food and household goods that comes with increased fuel costs is hurting everybody.

A lot of people have been aware of the ridiculous amount of tax on fuel for a while, the increased baseline price has just brought the issue to a head with the general public, and has given the protest organisers an opportunity to educate them about the tax issue. This is why the Americans aren't having fuel protests, because they don't pay any special taxes on fuel and are aware that it's just tied to the world oil prices.

and you think people are not already doing that? i use my car for work and shopping. thats it!

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Richie

SSAFA supporter
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=126025031585

As it's exam season I have no spare time to grab figures but the last time I saw figures, for 2001 if I remember correctly, 50% of road transport was subsidised. This was in line with public transport.[/quote]


Again I don't have any NHS figures but I doubt the competitive car insurance make any donations to the NHS. I can claim that each metre of M1 widened motorway costs £20,000 per metre. (not bad considering the west coast mainline upgrade cost about £50,000 per metre),


Agreed, transport is subsidised for a reason!


Totally agree!


I have no objection to the well established current level of subsidy. Indeed in real terms road transport has got cheaper over the last decade but it looks like it'll go up in the next decade.


And hopefully this will lead to people who use fuel for non essential trips to cut back to allow people like you to have fuel for essential trips. I won't be driving once I go to university in October.


Tax on fuel hasn't gone up with inflation unlike railway fares which have gone up above inflation. I think a "keep quiet" strategy might be in order here.

Wrong on two counts I'm afraid:

1. Tax has gone up absolutely (though not relatively) as VAT is levied on the price of fuel (plus on the duty, bizarrely), so for every 10p increase in the price of fuel before tax, the govt. get an extra 1.75p. Nice!

2. As the price of fuel is increasing faster than the rate of inflation, the tax has gone up (see point one) faster than inflation.

While I agree that the current increases are due to the price on the global market, people's anger is largely at the fact that the govt. is pressing ahead with increases to VED and fuel tax at a time when they're already making an absolute bomb out of VAT.

BTW: I'm certainly not disputing the fact that PT fares are going up faster than inflation. I think that's scandalous, when we're told we should all get out of our cars and onto buses/trains. But then that's this administration: all stick and no carrot.

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

Well, the inflation figure has been misleading for quite some time, it's kept artificially low (about 2%) due to the falling prices of consumer goods, things we don't actually need like home computers and plasma TVs as well as things that we do need but probably already own and can put off replacing for a bit longer like fridges and washing machines.
The things we do actually need are increasing in price much more rapidly, food (due to the increased cost of running farm equipment and transporting it to the shops), heating&electricity (due to the increased price of fuel), transport to work/shops. When you cut life down to the bare essentials it's just those three things, all of them are linked directly to fuel prices (even if you use PT, most of that runs on diesel) and last figures I saw had them increasing at about 8% while peoples wages are only increasing in line with the official inflation figure.

This is why we are seeing an increase in strike action over pay, and for those who can't strike for whatever reason their ire is targetted at the cause of the increased cost of living. They can't do much about world oil prices but they know the government could reduce the tax on fuel to compensate a bit, if they really wanted to.

Cue the Wrong Buzzer

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The Box said "Windows XP or better" ... So I installed Ubuntu

On another personal note, I think rising fuel prices could be the best thing that has happened to us. It will hopefully encourage us to start planning for the day that we reach peak oil.

Personal transport, however, is probably one of the hardest things to plan for. Hopefully there will be much more research in alternative fuels and hybrids but we can't put wires up on every road or build a nuclear reactor into every car. We can't have solar powered or wind power cars for obvious reasons. The same goes with agriculture (the process of turning oil into food).

Unfortunately the Government does not seem to want to do anything under its direct power to help the situation, such as new nuclear and renewable power plants, banning very-short-haul flights, changing modern town planning and electrifying public transport.


And if they did, it would probably be on essential red diesel not on petrol or white diesel which motorists are protesting over. If it's essential work travel, the extra cost should be paid for by the employer and passed onto the customer. If this results in food bills going up, the Government could subsidise food, especially local food. The Government is already paying insulation grants and fuel grants for the most needy, and these could be introduced.

The problem with lowering fuel tax is that the Government will also be subsidising the most wealthy people driving for pleasure and not need, often driving very inappropriate cars.

What the Government could do, however, is remove road tax which despite being easy and cheap to collect, is a flat-rate and therefore unfair tax. Insurance would also be better off if it was priced per mile, but this would require all insurance companies to change their pricing method at once.

I'm sure the people of the Scilly Isles, Channel Island and the Isle of Man will be wholeheartedly in support of this.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Oh god, even the thought of a nuclear car terrifies me given the number of poorly thought out "performance enhancing" modifications people like to do.



Well one thing I agreed with Blair on was the need for nuclear power, unfortunately that wouldn't fly with the environmentalists, well to be fair it's the stupid environmentalists who are the particular problem here, you know the sort, typically college students with no idea how the world works who somehow think we can build enough wind farms to power the entire country because wind farms don't cause any environmental issues at all.

Short Haul Flights? They've practically encouraged them, by forcing up the cost of travelling by car or PT, by making it take so damn long to get anywhere by car (due to speed enforcement, lack of education for road users and lack of capacity) or by PT (due to poor reliability and never going to where you need to get to) flying is often the most cost effective option. It doesn't help the situation that we currently have a business culture where a company in Inverness will buy from a supplier in South Wales because they're slightly cheaper, and still expect an engineer on site the next day if something goes wrong, but I can't blame the government for that one.


And if they did, it would probably be on essential red diesel not on petrol or white diesel which motorists are protesting over. If it's essential work travel, the extra cost should be paid for by the employer and passed onto the customer. If this results in food bills going up, the Government could subsidise food, especially local food. The Government is already paying insulation grants and fuel grants for the most needy, and these could be introduced.[/quote]

Cheap red diesel doesn't help the lorry drivers, emergency services or public transport, and an awful lot of people would get very very pissed off if the government started subsidising food at Tesco.

I just want to touch on the local food issue too, you haven't said it but a lot of people seem to think the answer to the problem is to buy all your food locally. This works great if you happen to live in a nice leafy suburb on the edge of town with a farm nearby, but if you live in the middle of a city it isn't going to happen as there is no local food production, it has to be shipped in from the outlying countryside. Now who tends to live in the middle of a city, unless that city is London then it will be poor people, ie. the people most likely to be hard hit by the rising cost of food.



It's not a subsidy, it's only a subsidy if it results in the price to the consumer being lower than the cost of producing and shipping that product to the consumer



Agree entirely. Even if you believe in the environmental argument, basing it on fuel consumed is a much more sensible way to curb emissions.



Completely unworkable, a lot of people will object to having a tacho or similar product recording where they've been, and there is no way to account for times when the car is being driven outside of the insurance policy, eg. off road or track use, being driven by someone other than the usual driver, who is using the cover provided by their own policy and many many other situations.

£20,000,000 per Km of Motorway Widening?

Where's this figure from?

Insurance premiums are weighted according to mileage along with a whole host of other factors.

Why should I pay for insurance purely by the mile anyway. If my car is say 40k per annum but is garaged in a respectable area every evening then why should I pay more than someone who has a lower mileage profile but keeps the vehicle on the street in some less salubrious part of town?

Call me old fashioned but I tend to like the rate I'm charged for things to have some reflection of the underlying cost.

I sometimes wonder just what all these "non essential trips" are that people are supposed to be doing in their cars. People don't just drive around for the sheer hell of it - they have to go to work, have to get their shopping, have to visit relatives in hospital etc.

I'm sure for the average person the amount of car mileage that is genuinely discretionary is well under 10%. I can't say I've noticed any fall-off in rush-hour traffic levels as people simply don't have a practical alternative.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

If that was the case, a certain number of car manufactures would go bust and people on this forum wouldn't moan about speed enforcement during holidays in Wales.


I appologise, the correct figure is £21,000,000 per mile, though I'm sure you were aware I wasn't far off.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/may/06/transport.world



Although, I'd still consider that to be buying locally compared to shipping it in from abroad. Once upon the time there were railway goods yards near all the mainline termini, for example bishops-gate just by Liverpool Street. Some bright spark decided it was cheaper to rely on lorries to ship in food. Perhaps it's time to price trucks out of business and take it by train again .

Also a well informed mate tells me that the railway, shipping and emergency services use red diesel and busses get 80% of tax back. The trucks are already subsidised enough by cars users who pay more than their fair share of road taxes while trucks don't pay enough to cover their damage.

Back to the VAT argument, I'm told that VAT has to be charged on petrol at the same % as everything else otherwise the Government would lose out if people paid more on petrol and less on other things. So unless people are using their savings to pay the extra in fuel, the increased pricing of petrol doesn't mean the Government earn more from VAT.

Well there is a reason that Subaru have spent all this time and money developing a diesel version of their engine. Most of the others (except the likes of Ferrari and TVR who only make a small number of highly priced cars) have a decent number of economy cars in their fleets.



You still need trucks for the last few miles, moreso if your delivering to a store that isn't in a major city (PT is laughable in the valleys where I live). And I thought it was only the overloaded trucks that causes excessive damage. It's not really fair to put the road tax up for those who are operating legally, especially since that may encourage them to operate fewer trucks and overload them too.



I think people are more annoyed about the duty than the VAT. Businesses don't pay VAT anyway so a cut in VAT would not help our economy so much. The reason the VAT figure gets chucked around in the media is because they can use terms like "windfall" to describe government profits. IMO it's the levels of duty that are excessive and I'd like to see the government use the duty levels to help stabilise prices rather than escalate them.