the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Andy Capp has been widely reported as saying that the recent budget wasn’t radical enough. As if it had nothing whatsoever to do with him and that he was as disappointed by it as nearly everyone else. Well, apart from Paddington and Ronald McDonald obviously. They must’ve been delighted with when Malekith announced abolishing the tariffs on imported marmalade and gherkins.

But there are some truly radical measure he could implement, and that is to tax choice. Inasmuch as you choose to pay a tax if you choose to do a certain thing, but equally, one can choose not to if you don’t do that thing. A simple choice. He clearly needs all the help he can get.The Chancellor, Malekith, thinks that offering people a one-off £100 discount on their winter energy bills will help to households facing an imminent 27% rise in their gas bills. But then he does earn over £166,000 a year, can claim almost anything as an expense and has a nice fat pension to look forward to.

One tax that could be instantly implemented is one that I’ve long considered crying out to be introduced. Tax people for speeding on motorways. The greater they exceed the speed limit by, the greater the tax they pay. The speed limit is 70mph, so that is automatically a £100 fine, rising in increments of £50 per additional 1mph until 80mph is reached. Then increments of £75 for every 1mph until 90mph and then again, rising by in increments of £25 for every subsequent 10mph excess.

It’s a winner from every angle. First of all, its not taxing people for something that they don’t already do, they do it all the time. They choose to do something that is illegal and which local councils already penalise them for. Secondly, we know that there’s not the remotest chance of drivers suddenly stopping speeding on motorways, They might slow down for a while, for a bit and even for their bank balance but muscle memory combined with the curious aggression that is peculiar to the driving seat would soon takeover. In fact, thats precisely that such a tax would be depending on.

Thirdly, collection would be a doddle. As mentioned, councils have perfected the use of speed camera’s to identify speeding motorists, so why can’t the Highways Agency do the same? To that end, sat-nav systems and other devices that alert drivers to approaching speed camera’s would be be banned. Any manufacturer who fails to remove this technology from their devices, including providing a free recall service for the ones in use, would be fined £5,000 per day until they could prove compliance.

Fourthly, any vehicle with more than 4 wheels must stay on the inside lane – unless overtaking to move immediately back into the inside lane – or face an automatic £100 fine. Only military vehicles would be exempt. There would also be an upper limit of a £1000 penalty per journey and if paid within 21 days, then no points would be added on their licence. If not, then the fine would be doubled and the the three points. The tax shouldn’t be so punitive that is discourages motorway driving, so therefore these measures would also apply to dual carriageways.

Quite why the speed limit on motorways hasn’t been enforced with anything like the ruthless tenacity that local councils police various urban ones has always baffled me. Local councils change the speed limit in urban area’s seemingly at will, often with no notice and usually with the most spurious of reasons for doing so. So a clearly defined measure that only penalises those who fail to comply with a long established law is the very definition of fairness. Its self-selecting. Only those who break the law would have to pay the tax and the more they break it, the more they’ll pay.

The money will flood in. The government will wonder why they hadn’t thought of this sooner. At the very least its more radical than making garlic cheaper.