Green Thieves

The Bank holiday weekend was an expensive one for CF.

The car was in need of a new tax disc. Because CF has 3 school age kids, and regularly takes 2 more on the school run, and lives in a small village where the road floods regularly and the hills are occasionally snowbound, he has selfishly and thoughtlessly bought (sorry, 'invested in') a 4-wheel drive, 7-seater vehicle.

This, in the modern 'green' world is viewed as an evil crime, somewhere between strangling kittens and scuttling oil tankers.

As is well known, anything this government doesn't like, it legislates against. And the few things it can't legislate against, it taxes into oblivion. The whole 'green' charade provides the perfect cover for this deceitful shower of shits to slip in a load more 'stealth' taxes.

In this case, CF's punishment for not driving the approved car was four hundred fucking quid.

For a fucking tax disc. To be allowed to use the roads. To be able to use the fucking fuel, bought last week by paying about 20 pence to BP and 85 pence to the Treasury for every precious litre.

Once the shock had subsided, it was time for the bank holiday ritual visit to DIY hell. To, among other things, stock up on light bulbs. Last chance to stock up on 'real' light bulbs before the nanny state sweeps them from the shelves, to save the planet from our evil wall lights.

The slack-jawed imbecile, whose role it is to act as a slow and inefficient interface between the till and the customer, was pleased to announce that all such bulbs had been "sold aht". Only new energy-efficient, 'green' bulbs remained.

For fuck's sake. As Charlotte Gore says they're utter crap, giving poorer, dimmer light, and looking pretty damn ugly while doing so.

But that's not the worst. You would think, would you not, that Nanny, keen for us to blight our homes and ruin our eyesight with these shitty little things, would somehow bribe us to do so.

A nice subsidy perhaps. A government funded BOGOF, to make us all go green.

But no. The complete fucking opposite. The bulk of the nasty things are made in China so, as the Devil points out, we pay massive 66% extra tarif on the bloody things.

Add to that the 'smug' tax that manufacturers attach to anything we think is good for us - organic wind turbines, anybody? - and the things are fucking exorbitant.

Ten times the cost of a normal bulb? They'd better last a bit longer. In fact, for that, they'd better scuttle through to the kitchen and make me a fucking cake.

But even though they're ten times the price, we have to buy them (to 'save the world'!!), as our old bulbs fail.

And then we have to be fined by tariff to discourage us from buying them too. More green extortion.

And where's that fucking money going anyway? Is that road tax going to repair that fucking great pothole a hundred yards down the hill? Of course not.

Is it going into research on leaner, greener cars? Nope.

Is the tariff on the light bulbs going to support the creation of a British energy-saving light bulb industry? Don't be fucking daft.

Is any of the money spent on any of this green bollocks going to help the climate? To buy armbands for polar bears and sunhats for ickle wabbits? Fuck off is it.

Hypothecation? Brown and Darling wouldn't know what that was if it bit their flabby arses.

It's all pouring into the same enormous pot. The pot where all the normal taxes and now all the new 'green' taxes go. A pot which, thanks to Gordon Brown's massive fucking incompetence, is still emptying faster than we can be tricked, bamboozled and forced into filling.

If anybody needs CF, he'll be in the garden, patio heater full on, roasting a polar bear over a 100 watt bulb.


.