British car industry workers are deeply concerned that punitive Labour government motoring taxes will cost them their jobs, according to weekly enthusiasts magazine Autocar.
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In interviews with the magazine, employees of Ford, General Motors, Bentley, Land Rover and Jaguar made public their worries about the future of UK car making, and the security of their jobs.
“I feel the government’s policies are clearly anti-car,” said Craig Caves, line manager at Ford of Britain’s Dagenham Diesel Centre east of London. “On a daily basis they are producing an anti-car mentality that can only threaten jobs in the car industry. And it’s not just us at risk; it’s all the people supplying us and the people local to the plant.”
And the picture is the same at (General Motors’) Vauxhall Ellesmere Port factory, near Liverpool. “This is the centre of our community,” said Phil Allman, plant convenor for the Unite Union at the Merseyside base.
“It’s not the politicians who lose out when things get cracked down on; it’s the family man who loses his job, and then we get family breakdown and social problems.
‘They say people can work in Tesco’s [the UK supermarket chain attracting media attention for its dominance of UK food retailing],” he added. “But not everyone wants to work in Tesco’s. There’s a real gap between the mindset of Westminster [London location of the UK government] and the outlook of the ordinary working man.”
Autocar noted that, in his last budget, UK chancellor [finance minister] Alastair Darling raised vehicle excise duty [more popularly known as ‘road tax’] by hundreds of pounds a year on some cars, as well as back-dating it to cover virtually all vehicles on the road.
He also introduced a ‘showroom tax’, effectively adding four figures to the purchase price of some UK-built cars, and has admitted that the proceeds of these taxes will fund the ongoing development of the technology necessary to make national road pricing [aka a per-mile travel tax] a reality.
“Under the current government’s watch, UK fuel prices have risen to record highs,” said Autocar features editor Matt Saunders, “and both local road charging schemes and ‘green taxes’ have hit motorists all over the country.”
“We’re all being forced into buying cheaper, more economical cars under the banner of environmentalism – and yet no home-owner has experienced the same pressure to buy a more efficient boiler, or locally-grown produce.
“What’s not-so-widely understood is that the UK motor industry specialises in luxury cars, 4x4s and sports cars, from the likes of Bentley, Land Rover, Jaguar, Aston Martin, and Lotus, that tend to produce more CO2. So these higher taxes are, in no small part, making life more difficult for the very brands we should be striving to protect.”
