A guide to the identification of hypocrites

Sure and there are lots of things that can be proposed. Some of them might even improve society. But when you’ve a proposal to punish a something or other, or extra-tax that something because it’s bad, but then also, in the same breath, one excepts the people one likes from that same tax or punishment for that bad thing, well, there’s the possibility - you know that gnat’s breath’s iota of a chance - that you’ll be accused of hypocrisy.

Taxing Britain’s SUVs in line with other European countries could raise almost £2bn a year for the public finances, research has shown.

The Transport & Environment thinktank has urged the government to use the autumn budget to bring in a levy on the largest vehicles, which it said would reflect the damage they caused to the environment and infrastructure.

T&E said the current UK vehicle tax system was not keeping up with the change in the profile of cars sold, with heavier and more polluting cars escaping adequate taxation and coming to dominate the market.

An “SUV loophole” meant UK buyers paid up to 20 times less tax on the biggest models than counterparts in other European countries, it said. Vehicle tax on a new £85,000 BMW X5 would amount to £3,200 in the UK, but the sale would incur taxes of £66,600 in France – driving UK SUV sales to four times the level in France.

Well, maybe. It’s certainly possible to think about the suggestion. Extra weight does harm roads more and thus imposes extra costs and all that.

Hmm?

It proposes an additional tax of £10 a kilogram for vehicles above a threshold of 1,600kg, with a further 400kg allowance for cleaner – but often heavier – battery electric cars.

So the justification is that extra weight which is the bad thing but the thing that you like doesn’t have to pay that extra tax because - well, unless EV weight is in some manner less road damaging - you like that thing.

It’s the sort of proposal that deserves a good box around the ears. Even if we’d never, no really, accuse the Transport and Environment think tank of hypocrisy. Perish.

Tim Worstall