Britain: THE SNOBBERY BEHIND ZAC AND DAVE'S 'TAX THE PLEBS' PLAN

Once, just once, wouldn't it be a joy to pick up a newspaper or turn on the television to find a complete absence of anything to do with politics? The problem is: politicians abhor a vacuum. If there's newsprint or airtime available, they think it is their divine duty to fill it, even at the expense of boring us all to distraction. Not a day goes by without some new crackpot scheme being hatched. Politicians wake up each morning determined to find fresh ways of picking our pockets and intruding still further into our lives. None of it is ever thought through properly.

Take yesterday, for instance. On one page, ministers announce they want to cut prison overcrowding. On the next, they call for motorists using mobile phones on the move to be jailed for two years. Go figure.

The "climate change" hysteria has proved a godsend for prodnoses and punishment freaks. I doubt there is a single country on earth where the entire political class has so completely taken leave of its senses over alleged global warming. Here in Britain, it has been seized upon as an exciting new weapon with which to inflict more taxes, fines and regulations on us. You expect this kind of nonsense from Labour and especially from Gordon Brown, who has never met a tax he doesn't like. Socialists have only ever had a passing acquaintance with the concept of individual liberty and low taxation. But when it comes to banging the climate-change gong, [Conservative leader] Call Me Dave and his gang are obsessed to the point of mental illness.

CMD's latest wheeze for winning power is a plan to put 2,000 pounds on the price of a family car and ban plasma TVs. Brilliant. That should go down well in the marginals, along with his other cunning scheme to make Britain the only place in the world to call a halt to airport expansion. Egged on by his Old Etonian mate Zac Goldsmith, whose dad made part of the family fortune tearing up large chunks of Bolivia, Dave also wants to restrict essential road building. So if your village is crying out for a new by-pass, forget it. Think of all the polar bears whose lives you're saving.

Where does Cameron get the idea that millions of swing voters are desperate to pay even more for their cars than they do already? Or that people will give up their plasma TVs for the sake of some unspecified rainforest? Why pick on plasmas? Are we supposed to go back to cumbersome cathode ray sets? It's not so long ago we were told they were destroying the Earth's crust in landfill sites. Are we supposed to stop watching television altogether?

What about all those people who make a living manufacturing, selling and servicing televisions? What are they to do - go and work in a windmill? Surely the Tories are the party of small government, individual choice and low taxes, or they are nothing. Yet here they are making common cause with "zero growth" eco-loonies who knit their own toilet paper.

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