New Labour's faith in e-democracy may just have taken a bit of a knock. It is one thing to employ the internet as a cutting-edge tool capable of slashing through the thickets of political apathy. It is quite another when a million people tell you - via the Downing Street website, no less - where you can stick your cherished policy.
Douglas Alexander, for these purposes England's Transport Minister, was putting on a brave face yesterday, as he does most mornings. The fact that a million car-users have signed to a petition rejecting road charging was, he conceded, a cause to "listen". It was important, he said, to have a "proper debate" on the subject, and to take heed of "a range of views".
What debate? Which range? One million objections may not count as a majority in a country of 44 million cars, but as straws in the wind go, the online response counts as a flying giant redwood.
Granted, aspects of the petition may well be slightly suspect. Perish the thought that incensed motorists have managed to vote more than once. Heaven forfend, equally, that the Daily Mail may have been urging its readers to stand up for the right of the little man to destroy the planet. Then again, some carped about the methods of the Chartists, once upon a time, and look where that got us. If "one million" (and counting) is disputable, let's settle for "a lot".
A lot of people are aghast at the idea of road-pricing. The same people tend to be aghast, daily, over traffic congestion. They are rational enough to worry about pollution. Few among them find ring-roads and motorways things of beauty. But tell them that price mechanisms are a super-efficient means for altering mass behaviour and they begin to ask awkward questions. One is this: when is a tax not a tax? Chancellor Gordon Brown's recent, modest increase in the surcharge on air-travellers was widely billed as "green" when, patently, it was nothing of the sort. Few people, if any, have been deterred from flying; the money flowing to the Treasury has not been earmarked, save in the vaguest way, for environmental measures; and no-one is fooled.
Many drivers make similar complaints over speed cameras and illegal parking. In neither case should there be significant arguments: if you break the law, you break the law. But motorists see cameras sprouting everywhere; they see controlled parking spreading across cities; they see councils across Britain toying with congestion-charging. They conclude, with reason, that the powers-that-be find the revenue potential of a captive market far more attractive than any clean, green future.
As new Labour chugs along, it overlooks another blind spot in its rear-view mirror. The truth of recent parcel bombings of the DVLA and other organisations has yet to be established, but the whiff of paranoid extremism seems plain from the pattern of attacks. The best guess is that somewhere a motorist is mad, possibly clinic- ally, as hell. The point is that no-one is surprised.
After arguments over tax come arguments over liberty. In some quarters, the wrecking of speed cameras has become a minor sport. In Edinburgh, the rejection of congestion charging was unequivocal. In London, Ken Livingstone is facing a storm because he intends to extend the charging area into Kensington and Chelsea, despite the vociferous objections of councils and public. It all comes down to money, of course. Most things do. But the resentment runs deeper than that.
Motoring is indefensible: such, crudely, is the environmental case cheerfully adopted by government. That being so, drivers supposedly can have no argument against any measure that might, conceivably, alter their habits. They cannot say a tax is unfair when the future of the planet is at stake. They cannot claim that a tax is brutally regressive when the guilt for pollution and congestion is shared by all private motorists. And they cannot ever invoke individual freedom, so it is believed, when the greater good is at stake.
That, though, is precisely the issue that seems to have inspired one million objectors. The first clue is that the government denies any intention to introduce electronic tagging for drivers. Experience says we should best watch out, then. Different technologies may be under consideration, but the essentials are obvious. In order to debit your account - £1.28 a mile on busier roads has been suggested - they have to know where you are and when. At all times.
Coming from a government that has changed its story over ID cards repeatedly, this is not reassuring. People in Britain already spend more time under surveillance than any population on the planet. As with the cards, insult is added to injury with the news that we will have to pay to be spied upon in a road-pricing scheme - £200 per tracking device per vehicle has been mentioned - but the principle at stake is costlier. When did a wholesale loss of liberty become the price of clean air?
Civil liberties are not New Labour's strong suit. Who, they think, could fear a government so obviously trustworthy? They demand ID cards that no American President, even the latest, has thought of imposing on his people. They demand that confidential medical histories be gathered on a centralised database, accessible to all and sundry. They encourage CCTV cameras in every village. They can track you through cash machines or mobile phones; they can, with American aid, follow your e-mails and faxes. In that context, road-pricing seems less than friendly towards personal environments. It seems like the last straw.
As Alexander has been arguing, none of these complaints will solve the congestion problem. True enough. While he "listens", nevertheless, 10 areas in England have charging schemes under consideration. Treasury brains foresee a government take in the region of £28bn a year in addition to the £47bn that drivers already pay. How could they resist?
The British resentment of toll roads goes back a long way; centuries before global warming limits on the right of free people to travel where they liked when they liked provoked sabotage and revolt. Before Iraq, meanwhile, fuel duty protests were the cause of new Labour's most serious political wobble. Taxing the freedom of movement per mile, per minute, could make even that fuss seem petty. And promised "improvements in public transport" won't answer.
Last week at Holyrood, Annabel Goldie of the Tories tried to question Jack McConnell about road-pricing. The First Minister responded by suggesting, in effect, that the issue is none of the Scottish Executive's business, as best he knows. McConnell is mistaken. Yet can we conceive of mass surveillance in England while Scotland remains at motoring liberty? Hardly.
For that matter, will emissions be reduced if and when the first £28bn is gathered in? Will it all be worthwhile? Motoring habits may be excessive but they are not, for most, optional. Road-pricing is rather like telling an eighteenth-century peasant that the price of bread has doubled, that the poll tax is here to stay and that he cannot take to the highway in hope of escape.
It may also be a high price to pay for the knowledge that pricing mechanisms do not, in fact, solve every crisis.
Read Ian Bell also in the Sunday Herald
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