Mike Rutherford's column

	Alistair Darling will raise an extra £1,200million from his new tax – not that he’s honest enough to put it like that in his vacant manner

I once drove down from Los Angeles to the dusty US/Mexico border where I festered for an entire, sweaty afternoon while the Yanks decided whether to let me out and the Mexicans wondered if they should allow me in. After the shenanigans at the frontier, I stopped at a roadside café for a much-needed cold drink. That’s when a local bandit with strange eyebrows introduced himself to me.

He called himself Mexican Al, and he attempted to pickpocket me, steal my car keys and ‘borrow’ my driving licence and credit cards. He then pulled out a pack of cards and other props which enabled him to do an awful lot of cheating. At the same time he gabbled away in English, and although I heard everything he said, I didn’t understand where he was coming from.
Mexican Al was much more than a roadside robber. He had this ability to bamboozle and disorientate his potential victims with a combination of vague promises, incomplete statements and sinister underlying threats.

Closer to home, Scotch Al is a similar sort of bloke. I first had dealings with him when he was Transport Minister, and within the last few days he has come back to haunt me again – by threatening 50 million car users with higher taxes when we buy new cars and further punitive levies when we use them. Scotch Al is, of course, Chancellor Alistair Darling, who surely must have been a classmate of Mexican Al at the Institute of Highway Banditry.

I don’t intend to touch on everything that Scotch Al did to motorists in the Budget, but I have to pull him up on his horribly confusing and extremely worrying Sales Tax on some new cars. Two decades ago there was a similar discriminatory tax on showroom models. It was known in everyday speak as Special Car Tax. But on the grounds that there was no Special Tax on planes, trains, buses, boats, lawn mowers, central heating boilers, or any other pieces of kit pumping out CO2 emissions, the inequitable Special Car Tax had to and did go, largely thanks to an Auto Express campaign.

Now Scotch Al has decided to bring it back. It will help him raise an additional £1,200million in road user taxation. That’s on top of the £55,000million per annum he already makes in motoring related income. Not that he’s honest enough to put it like that when he speaks in his famously vacant manner. And as for a mention in the Labour Party Manifesto to the effect that drivers are now the party’s public enemy number one, forget it. That would be spelling out to us how it is, as opposed to bamboozling and disorientating us with rabbit-from-the-hat con tricks.

Talking of being conned, Scotch Al has also resurrected the idea of pay-per-mile toll roads in England but, interestingly, NOT his native Scotland. If, as expected, he sneaks them through south of the border there will be considerably more expense for drivers in England and much more profit for his UK Treasury. But again, he’s being deliberately fuzzy on this matter. I’ve already asked him in a live broadcast to simply confirm or deny whether he plans toll fees of up to £1.30 per mile. And there was no denial. Now, in his Budget speech, he talks with renewed enthusiasm about road pricing or to be more accurate, additional road pricing.

I honestly don’t remember a time when motorists have been bullied, beaten and mugged quite so comprehensively.