Sorry to let the facts get in the way of a good story...
Fuel Duty is but £30bn of a £600bn total for Government spending. Income tax on the other hand is £180bn. Add in VAT (£100bn) and National insurance (another £100bn) and our wages and spending contribute £380bn of the total. It is far more important to keep the 40% threshold for paying tax where it is (to trap more people into paying more income tax) and lower the NI thresholds for employees and companies get more there. More details here...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datab...-receipts-1963
...that show that projected increases in income tax, VAT and NI are forecast, biut almost no increase in fuel duty overall.
What's more interesting is that it is Tory Governments that take the largest percentage of GDP in tax (the more we earn as a nation, the more they take) than Labour. The same thing applies to company profits - they make more profit during Labour administrations than Tory. And the worst offender at taking more of our earned money (GDP) in tax since 1963? Margaret Thatcher. Yes, the blessed Margaret took more of our money than any other Government since MacMillan in 1963. Mind you, she did lower to top rate of tax for the top 1% of earners from 98% to 40%, it's just that the rest of us ended up paying for that!
It has always amazed me that people who want to pay less tax vote Tory! They are good if you're earning over £100k a year, but that level applies to 400,000 people. 10.7m people voted Tory and by those numbers 10.3m of them have been screwed on income tax, VAT and NI! Over 15m people earn between £15k and £50k, so you can see that leaving the 40% threshold at £34k in 2011 reducing to £32k in 2013/14 is an excellent way of raising taxes. When Labour were in it was £40k!
If you earn more that £50k you are in the top 5% of earners in the UK. The 54 billionaires in this country pay a total of about £14m in tax, of which James Dyson (£9m) and JK Rowling pay 90% of that amount. (Note that despite taking their production to Malaysia, Dyson pay 80% of their profit taxes in the UK.)
So fuel is not the key to the economy. There are plenty more things to get cross about, like the creeping 40% rate and the failure to make billionaires pay proper tax amounts - both made worse since 2010 by the Tories. We'll all have the chance to vote them out on 2015, won't we?!! Sorry about the facts...
