No, neither do I, which is why I didn’t say so.

If I see a government realistically proposing to multiply fuel tax by ten, I’ll take that seriously. I don’t think Mr Band has Mr Brown’s ear, though, so I’m really quite relaxed about it all.

Ah, but they’d gain from the road-pricing, so everything would be ok.

Oh, no, not impossible. There’s no train where I work, but I could get a bus here from Belfast. Only I don’t live in Belfast, so I’d have to commute into the city first, so my commute would nearly double in length, on far slower methods of transport, increasing my commute time from about half an hour to about two hours, leaving me with no time for anything in my life but work. Yay!

But that’s just me. Plenty of people in the UK live in places where there are one or two buses per day. Not everyone lives in a city centre, which is why Scots Highlanders get so pissed off with urbanites talking about increasing fuel tax to "encourage" everyone to use public transport. For millions of people, it’s simply not an option, and increasing fuel tax simply "encourages" them to become poorer while funding public transport for people in cities.

Still not answered my question, I see. Are people who would be impoverished and who would have their quality of life fucked up by your policy the right people to piss off?

Yeah. You can always adjust for this by manipulating the prices for different vehicles, but it’s messier than simply taxing the fuel. I’m something of a fan of taxing things to their externalities, so would suggest retaining a fuel tax but having it cover the direct environmental costs of pollution, and using road pricing to encourage less congesting behaviour, but this obviously makes the thing slightly harder to sell politically (since it’s a new tax, not a "fairer replacement for an existing tax").