Monday, March 12, 2007

The Death of England   [Mark Steyn]

By the way, I’m still agog at Andrew Stuttaford’s morning post about the British Conservative Party proposing to give each citizen a government-approved travel allowance. If you take one flight a year, you’ll just pay the standard amount of tax on the journey. If you travel more frequently, you’ll be subject to additional levies – in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bears and carbon-offset palace.

Isn’t this the very definition of totalitarianism-lite? The Soviets restricted the movement of people through the bureaucratic apparatus of "exit visas". The Tories are proposing to do it through the crudest form of regressive taxation. As with the Communists, the nomenklatura – the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Madonna – will still be able to jet about hither and yon. What’s a 20 per cent surcharge to them? Especially as those for whom vast amounts of air travel are deemed essential - government officials, NGOs, environmental scolds – will no doubt be exempted from having to pay extra. But the ghastly masses will have to stay home. Foreign travel will be restored to the good old days of the Grand Tour when the beaches of the Mediterranean weren’t polluted by the great unwashed.

This is a great test case as to how much freedom people will be willing to lose in exchange for eco-virtue. "Freedom of movement"? The movement’s still free, but there’s now a government processing fee of $89.99.

03/12 04:12 PMShare