No Green Tory Taxes
This is an unadulterated Good Thing. “Green” taxes are a bad idea, and don’t even serve any real purpose except as a means for government to take more of our hard-earned money away from us. Being “green” isn’t about paying extra taxes on “polluting” things, since taxes are already paid on them. And taxing them more will only hurt those lower down on the economic scale anyway.
Carrots work better than sticks in these situations. Any party who is serious about reducing Britain’s carbon emissions, for whatever reason, must accept that taxing “bad” things like this isn’t the way forward, and I am very glad that the Conservative Party has realised this, even if belatedly.
This entry is filed under "Green" Issues, Conservative Party, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I think there will be taxes, but they need to be issued as an alternative so people can take actions to help fight climate change and the huge issues this will involve, they should be able to avoid paying them.
It’s my belief that green taxes would be most punitive on those who couldn’t afford to upgrade their homes, cars etc to greener versions and alternatives. Those who could afford to pollute probably would - bizarrely, your ability to poison the planet could become a warped status symbol, and indicator of wealth - and that’s no way to tackle not only climate change but, as importantly, as you point out, the issue of sustainability - and also, it goes against modern ideals of social justice among all those below a certain age irrespective of their political allegiances if any.
We may have some way to go but that’s no reason to go in the opposite direction to the right one. Green punitive taxes would worsen the divide between rich and poor.
What we need are meaningful, truly useful and means-tested grants to help everyone install solar panels and wind turbines; more allotments in our towns and cities, not less, not sold off to developers; relaxing of laws so that those currently unable to keep chickens in urban gardens could do so - giving not only eggs and therefore naturally helping in the erosion of viability in intensive battery farming, but also providing a means of keeping food out of landfills (salad bags count as the worst, but hens and other fowl love greens); the ending of the local authority practice of chopping down mature, decades-old trees and replacing them with saplings to avoid lawsuits if branches fall; and, the reevaluation of our ‘green deserts’ - those vast tracts of land in town centres and housing estates that are just grass and, worse, cut regularly when they could be at the very least left to turn to meadow and provide not only wild flowers but a habitat for Britain’s endangered countryside creatures.
*phew* And that’s just a few ideas! The point is that taxation is the easiest way of saying we’re doing something without doing anything positive at all. It isn’t radical and it won’t work.