Date published: 2007/03/11
The BBC says:
The Conservatives are planning a series of new environmental taxes on flights aimed at combating climate change.
The party will publish a consultation document on Sunday asking people for their views on various proposals.
The proposals include levying VAT or fuel duty on domestic flights and a green air miles scheme.
Shadow chancellor George Osborne said the tax proposals would be targeted at frequent fliers and not families taking their annual holiday.
Another measure under consideration in the Greener Skies consultation paper is scrapping air passenger duty and replacing it with a new "per flight" tax based on carbon emissions.
...
Mr Osborne said: "We're saying that taxes on aviation need to increase."That's because we think you need to take the tough long-term decisions to tackle climate change."
But he said the taxes needed to be designed so that they did not "hit people who only have one package holiday a year" and that they target "more dirty engines on aeroplanes".
"That way we have the maximum environmental effect and we also don't tax people out of their one foreign holiday a year," he said.
Sure, airplane fuel should be taxed. And if they have to start by imposing this on domestic flights then that just about makes sense (but see below). And if they wanted to replace the idiotic air passenger duty with a tax based on emissions then that is even better, that really does make more sense. Unfortunately everything else they propose is rather silly.
In particular, imposing VAT on domestic flights is not very bright. For one thing, businesses can reclaim VAT so this has no impact on business customers. For another thing (and this also applies to taxing fuel just for domestic flights), people who do not live near London often have to fly into Heathrow to catch a long-haul flight, so Mr Osborne evidently thinks people who do not live near London should pay a special tax to leave the country.
However the grand prize for silliness goes to the idea of a "green air miles scheme". It seems that the more you fly the higher the tax you will pay. But apparently the patrician Mr Osborne (presumably with the approval of the patrician David Cameron) believes that the peasants should be allowed "one foreign holiday a year". How kind of the ruling elite to drop a few crumbs of bread to the peasants.
And how would this scheme exactly work? How would the government know how many air miles you have done? Of course they would have to introduce a vast new bureaucracy, at huge expense, to keep track of this. (So this would not be a tax neutral proposal, since someone has to pay for this bureaucracy.) And would business trips count against your personal quota? It seems at first sight that yes, they would. How fair is that? And so if you take your annual holiday in Spain before you do your annual business trip to Germany, then you pay low tax and your company pays high tax, but if it is the other way around then the taxation is the other way around. How sane is that?
And will people in government have their work flights count against their quota? Or will Cameron and Osborne find a magical reason why they should be excused from this silly scheme?
Further, if you live in Cambridge and are planning a holiday to Japan then in future the smart thing to do will be to go down to Stansted, hop on a plane to Amsterdam (low tax because not many miles), and then fly to Tokyo from there (no tax because it is beyond the jurisdiction of Britain). Of course this will lead to an increase in global emissions (because you have doubled the number of takeoffs and landings). Well, the government will eventually get around this tax avoidance by getting the entire EU to adopt this silly scheme.
The comedy act of Osborne and Cameron will not be the people who suffer from this tax. The rich will always go about their business unimpeded. What they are really trying to do is to screw the ordinary people of Britain. The Tories are lucky that Labour is so unpopular, because all the Tory policy proposals so far are so crackpot that they would not have any chance of winning the next election otherwise.
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