This is almost a first for any government of MY country. A tax increase that is remarkably clever. And trust me, I’m no ‘I WANT TO PAY MORE!!’, Melvyn Bragg type, neo-Corbynista champagne socialist. But this is clever.

They’re making road tax a ‘flat rate’ of £140 a year, for all cars, including, for the first time, all hybrid vehicles. Previously exempt, these vehicles get to join the road tax club with the rest of us. Fully electric cars (assuming such things have a zero CO2 emission rate) are still exempt.

The good news is that your Ferrari, or 1957 Merc 300 SL is only going to pay 140 quid too, whereas they currently pay a lot more because they spew thousands of litres of noxious shit into the atmosphere every time the door opens.

I don’t like tax, particularly in the UK where we pay more than any other nation (a statistic true in my mind if not actually valid elsewhere), but I find it mindless when the raising or implementation of a form of taxation actually provides the government with less money than they had before. Like raising the ‘stamp duty’ when you buy a house. They raised it sky high (where it still remains), counting all that extra revenue they’d inherit as a consequence, and people just stopped moving house so much. So they now make far less in total than they did when the tax was lower. Which falls well into the ‘WHAT’S THE FUCKING POINT????’ category of fiscal stupidity.

Similarly, when they raise income tax too much (1% is too much, 25% too little), they end up with less money in the national coffers. Because very rich people are mobile and can just ‘move away’ and pay tax in a more friendly environment, and others get much more creative about how their pay and income is structured. There’s always a way.

But putting road tax on hybrids actually makes sense. Because if everyone in the country suddenly got ‘green’ and dumped the old Jag to replace it with a Prius, environmentalists would pop open the (free-range, organic, eco-friendly, zero-emission) champagne but there’d be not a penny of road tax coming in. Which would be a massive loss. So the government are ‘hedging’. If the uptake on hybrids increases, they won’t lose the tax revenue.

Alternatively, people may now think; well if there’s no tax gain, why am I driving a shitty fucking hybrid when I could drive a proper car? It’ll be interesting to see if hybrids maintain their ‘zero rating’ on the London congestion charge. We can get back to talking ‘zero to sixty’ rather than ‘zero emission’. Just sayin’.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx