An example of the politics of dreams I’m afraid.

The people pushing this and arguing for its introduction are big business who will make fortunes from it. The end user i.e. the driver will never see any benefit; only huge increases in cost which go directly to the private companies like Capita who will run the scheme.

London is a good template – nearly all the £1.2Billion in charges has gone in running the scheme. Why repeat such a dreadful mistake?

Further to this different plants manage the process slightly differently with infinite variation in the by-products.

Our friend Bob, above, seems to have a seen a definitve set of facts but has failed to understand how this knowledge can be applied to different situations with different effects.

Pollution is like weeds, in that both are perfectly normal things which happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong to the wrong effect for our purposes.

I wonder if we really ever think through how our pronouncements can be misused by non-liberals. Which bit of “safeguard a free, fair and open society … fundamental values of liberty” don’t we understand?

“to tax differently, not more” – have you bothered to read the document yet?

No, it’s not. If it was for reducing carbon emissions it wouldn’t be trying to force people off of the shortest and most fuel efficient routes even when there is traditionally no congestion on them (outside of rush hours). This policy intends to cash in on convenient travel while aimlessly hoping to tackle congestion.

I personally don’t have a problem with the database society as I believe that with proper safeguards and policies there is no reason for our information to become dangerous to us. What I have a problem with is the people administering it that seem unable to do so effectively. We can sit here with our situation at the moment and STILL argue against more pervasion of this type of system through our society because there is no “door” to close.

The whole database issue is a river that is growing. Yes, we have to live with the river as it stands, but that doesn’t mean we can’t build defenses to hold the river back, or even to go back up stream and make measures to alleviate it’s threat. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the argument that “we’re already tracked” is both not a new argument, nor is it one that stands in direct contradiction to people asking to not be tracked/recorded any further.

But this whole issue has got off base, the problem with this idea is not the privacy issue (though that is a part of it), it’s that the Lib Dems are abandoning the tradition of being the party to actually think its policies through and to start becoming one that throws out headlines it thinks people want to hear..in this case more taxation on polluting nasty cars without any kind of policy idea for improving public transport.

“there are not just two ways to deal with the problem: there is a third, which is leave it to the ‘market’. The fact that there is congestion on a particular road at a particular time is a function of hundreds or thousands of individual decisions.”

But the proposed policy is presented primarily as a means of reducing carbon emissions. Clearly “leaving it to the market” isn’t going to achieve that.

Of course, it’s very questionable whether the answer is to reduce fuel tax and replace it with road-pricing for selected journeys!

His words were fine and he did have an effective style of oratory, unfortunately his actions became increasingly divergent from his words: do you remember “we will not introduce top-up fees and have legislated to prevent them”?

I understand the motivation behind the precautionary principle, but that shouldn’t lead to anyone to sit on their hands to avoid taking action, it should force us to get the design right before we introduce it (though political reality means this is rarely the case).

Both the problems you raise are consequences of flaws in the design process which led to flaws in the design (or lack thereof) in the system.

re John D and civil liberties: a notoriously brutal kidnap/rape/murder case from my area was solved by the ANPR system tracking a suspected vehicle within 30 minutes of the report being filed so I can recognise the applications. I still think however that it is important to make the distinction between dual-carriage highways and the universally accessible streets and by-ways which we live on and walk down, elsewise are we going to start charging pedestrians and cyclists?

Disagree profoundly. The job then becomes to shoot the horse if it has been let out. It may take longer, but it is still worth doing.

And there are enough miscarriages of justice around to make success possible.

The same (“it is here, we can’t change it”) point was probably made about everything from slavery to MPs expenses to corruption in the Met Police in Soho to the Sus Laws.

I hope to reply to some of your points in detail this evening or tomorrow.

Matt W

I rest my case.

Paul

Then what’s the point in even being a Liberal any more? not for you, I mean, for me. If fighting against government surveillance is a lost cause then I might as well hang up my keyboard and go live in a tree on some island somewhere.