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•Green taxes raised over £40 billion in 2010
•Even after accounting for the cost of road building and greenhouse gas emissions, they were excessive by over £13 billion
The biggest threat to taxpayers right now is expensive new green taxes and subsidies. In the first ever mainstream book on this subject – published Thursday 18 August – TaxPayers’ Alliance Director Matthew Sinclair has exposed how this is the critical new threat to family finances. With rising fuel bills and petrol prices, it will be a defining feature of the political landscape over the coming year.
‘Let Them Eat Carbon’ shows how Fuel Duty is putting huge pressure on motorists. An energetic campaign against the tax is arguing for it to be frozen for the rest of this Parliament, after the cut at the last budget, and is among the most popular on the new
government e-petition website.
Increases in Fuel Duty and other green taxes have frequently been justified by the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions but estimates in the new book show that argument isn’t credible. Providing new figures and using a method pioneered in earlier studies for the TaxPayers’ Alliance and used by researchers at the Department for Transport, it finds that green taxes were excessive compared to the harms they are meant to address: