I’m glad to see that The Government is finally doing its bit for the environment by using yesterday’s budget to add a few pence onto the price of a litre of diesel and also by raising the Road Tax on 4x4s to £400 a year! I fully realise that using my beat-up fourteen year old Isuzu Trooper a couple of times a week to nip to the supermarket or pick the missus up from work makes me an environmental terrorist of the worst kind and deserving to be financially punished, whereas all those Business Executives and Government Ministers with as many cars on the driveway as there are people in the family and who spend more time in the fucking air than I do on the road, are really lentil sucking hippies and tree huggers of the first order.

Under the circumstances, it would be churlish of me to point out that I would quite happily run my car on non-polluting Bio-Diesel or on a more environmentally friendly mixture of vegetable oil and diesel, were it not for the fact that I’m not allowed to put vegetable oil in my fuel tank, without first asking The Government’s permission and [needless to say] paying that institutionalised mugger -The Taxman- his customary blood money in the form of duty on this "fuel". Duty which effectively brings its cost per litre up to pretty much what it would be if I just used regular 'environment-raping' diesel in the first place.

Let’s stop the pretence, shall we? Yesterday’s budget, like all others before it, was dedicated to The Government’s love of "greenbacks" - not "green".