THEMIGHTYZEUS

Motorists don’t pay for roads. Taxpayers do.

As a cyclist, other than the wind, my biggest enemy on the roads are, unsurprisingly, motorists. Or more specifically, the kind of ignorant, grotesque moron that’d shout “Get on the path, you f&*king road tax dodger!”  between wiping the pasty from his mouth and tuning between TalkSport and 5Live.

In fact, Road Tax was finally abolished in 1937 by Churchill who didnt want the public to think they had ownership of the roads because of a token payment, saying in 1926 in opposition to Road Tax “It will be only a step from this for them to claim in a few years the moral ownership of the roads their contributions have created”.

Before 1937, revenues created from Road Tax went into a Road Fund. It was this Road Fund that was used to pay for road maintenance, construction and repair. Post 1937, the Vehicle Exercise Duty was put into place, from which all revenues are pooled into central government finances at the Treasury, not to Dept of Transport. Thus, national road maintenance, repair and construction is paid for through general taxation, and local roads are paid for by the local council through Council Tax.

That tax disc in your car is properly called Vehicle Exercise Duty and is worked out based on CO2 emissions, it is not based on how much damage a vehicle does to the road as many believe. To be fair, the direct.gov website refers to it by either it’s proper name - Vehicle Exercise Duty or as ‘Car Tax’ which is also acceptable to cyclists as it doesn’t imply a right to the road as ‘Road Tax’ does but ‘Road Tax’ still persists as the dominant term because it is incorrectly used by many organisations such the BBC, AA, the police and Which?Car magazine. The editor of Which?Car magazine recently stated that they use the terms ‘road tax’ and ‘car tax’ instead of the correct term ‘Verhicle Exercise Duty’ purely because more people search Google for those incorrect terms than do for the correct one. So to generate hits it will stick to using the incorrect terms. Which seems odd, that a well respected magazine would knowingly be inaccurate, but there we are (link to the article at the bottom).

If cyclists are Road Tax dodgers then so is the Queen and all royal vehicles, disabled drivers (of which there are over a million), Emergency service vehicles, ministerial cars, band A cars and cars owned by American soldiers stationed in Britain, all of which do not pay VED.

Also, just a quick side note from the Highway code:

       64. You MUST NOT cycle on a pavement.

       [Laws Highways Act 1835 sect 72 & R(S)A 1984, sect 129]

Yea. So there. Most of the time I don’t have enough time to shout all that back at (usually) the taxi driver so more often than not simply throw out a finger, a “FUCK YOU!” and chalk it up as a win.

Get more info! Knowledge is power:

http://ipayroadtax.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Excise_Duty

http://www.bikebiz.com/news/32087/Which-prints-road-tax-error-wont-correct-it

FREE MARC EMERY!

Today, Marc Emery, a Canadian citizen, is to be handed over to US authorities for alleged crimes that were 100% carried out in Canada, are legal in Canada, and that the Canadian government are not willing to prosecute.

Marc’s crime? He owns a marijuana seed selling business that sold and shipped marijuana seeds to customers in the US over the internet.

Seeds are legally sold in Canada (like in the UK), so a fair approximation would be someone in Canada ordering a gun from the US and the fuzz turning up on the doorstep of the CEO of Colt and deporting him to Canada to be tried. That wouldn’t happen obviously, they would arrest the guy who ordered the gun. But this case it’s different, “but why?!” I hear you cry, well simmer down and I’ll tell you.

Marc Emery isn’t just any old seed seller. Marc is also one of the most well known pro-marijuana activists in North America (probably the world) as well as being the publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and co-founder of the Freedom Party of Ontario, the Marijuana Party of Canada and the BC Marijuana Party. He has also stood for Mayor of Vancouver 3 times. He is the legalization movement’s loudest voice……which got him on America’s most wanted list.

Have a gander at the astoundingly arrogant statement the US DEA released on the day of Marc’s arrest:

    Today’s DEA arrest of Marc Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture Magazine, and the founder of a marijuana legalization group — is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.

    His marijuana trade and propagandist marijuana magazine have generated nearly $5 million a year in profits that bolstered his trafficking efforts, but those have gone up in smoke today.

    Emery and his organization had been designated as one of the Attorney General’s most wanted international drug trafficking organizational targets — one of only 46 in the world and the only one from Canada.

    Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.

One less pot of money….that’s genius. I really didn’t think they could’ve topped the Cheech & Chong Up In Smoke reference, happy to be wrong in this instance.

The statement itself reads more like a triumphalist announcement of the capture of a terrorist or gangland boss than the arrest of a hippy selling seeds….well aside from the puns i guess. The statement itself doesn’t even mention Marc’s crime, only his political activities.

I’m confident Marc would’ve laughed at the puns as he was having his right to be tried by a jury of his peers taken away from him at the say so of the US government. Bare in mind, that Canadian police did not charge Marc, he was taken into custody by Canadian police at the request of the US DEA.

It’s clear the DEA aren’t prosecuting Marc for the sale of seeds, they are trying to clamp down on the pro-marijuana/legalisation movement, nip it in the bud so to speak.. (i’m sorry), and are out to make an example of Marc, in a similar way to the example made of Tommy Chong when he was sent to jail in 2003 for the sale of bongs and pipes even though he was just the face on the bong, it wasn’t even his company.

It’s a frightening world we live in when key human rights can be suspended at the behest of the US at any time, merely for holding a different view point on a drug that has never caused a single fatality in the history of recorded medicine.

There’s obviously not much non-US or Canadian nationals can do but you can show support at the links below and if you are American or Canadian i plead for you to contact your MP or Congressman.

Get more info! Knowledge is power:

http://www.cannabisculture.com/noextradition

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-9077214414651731007# - The Union documentary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_emery