Battle against Toad's road rage

Michael White
The Guardian,
Friday July 11, 2008

Sales of gas-guzzling cars have collapsed in North America and are dropping fast in Britain. But it is market forces, oil at $140 a barrel, which is finally curbing the motorist's appetite for expensive driving, not the government's green tax changes. That does not mean there is nothing for governments to do, only that it is difficult to fight tabloid road rage. Nudging, not bullying, is the fashionable verb of the moment, coined by two American academics and already purloined by Barack Obama and David Cameron. Cameron and his shadow chancellor, George Osborne, are keen to nudge us all towards greener behaviour.
But how? Osborne made a speech to the Green Alliance this week in which he ticked several boxes: a better carbon trading system which would auction permits, not give them away; a carbon levy instead of the flawed climate change levy which does not reflect actual emissions; better incentives to develop green technologies, potentially huge global industries.
Politics being a body-contact sport, the Tory twins also want to beat the government. Labour's approach "gives green taxes a bad name", they say, because it is poor at changing habits or cutting pollution, much better at raising revenue for the Brown-Darling Treasury. No wonder voters resist the green agenda, especially now that times are harder.
At this point the high-minded Tory agenda collides with the motoring lobby's eternal demand for cheaper motoring: the rightwing press is always happy to play Mr Toad behind the wheel. Labour MPs with marginal seats join in. They saw what the Tories "Grand Theft Auto" leaflet on soaring motoring costs did at the Crewe byelection.
The result: a deft campaign from Mr Osborne which urges Alistair Darling to postpone the scheduled 2p increase in petrol tax and abandon his budget proposal for a sharp rise in vehicle excise duty (VED) on both new gas guzzlers and - more important - on older, more polluting cars sold since 2001. Some green campaigners are irritated too. Labour has been clumsy on green taxes, prone to "grand gestures followed by cave-in".
Darling's March budget also failed to make the VED change clear, whereas good green policy needs transparency, "carrots and sticks, but also tambourines," the energy specialist, Andrew Warren, told an audience this week. The tambourine is the bit on the tax bill which explains why saving energy - or garden waste - can save you money.
Ministers have mishandled VED and may be forced to retreat. But much of the row is phoney. Gordon Brown's "misleading" remark to MPs that a "majority" of motorists will benefit from the 2009-10 VED change was an error.
But Cameron's own reply to the slip stated the position correctly, as Brown had on a previous occasion: a majority will benefit or be unaffected. Few will pay the extra £245. But Britain cannot go on postponing climate change pain every time it starts to hurt.