Episode 15 – Is the New Pay-Per-Mile Tax Good for Britain?

Justine Thomas (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the show. My name is Justine Thomas.

GT (00:04)
My name’s Gareth Thomas and this is The Tea Word.

Justine Thomas (00:09)
Yay! So Gareth, how are you? How’s your week been?

GT (00:15)
It’s been all right. I’m a little bit itchy. But other than that, itching to get started this week, itching to know what you want to talk about. What’s been grinding your gears this week, Justine?

Justine Thomas (00:21)
Yes.

Just about everything. ⁓ Well, there’s the whole Rachel Reeves speech and the whole debacle around. Well, I don’t even know what the point of that speech was anyway. So yeah, what’s going on with the economy? ⁓ Obviously the big ticket item has got to be ⁓ David Lammy and the Escapist prisoners. ⁓ So we need to talk about that.

And of course today is Remembrance Sunday and the shocking interview that Alec Penston gave the 100 year old war veteran who said that basically fighting for Britain wasn’t worth it and that his colleagues wouldn’t recognize the Britain of today. So yeah, there’s, there are things on my list, but what do you want to talk about? You go first.

GT (01:19)
So, yeah, Lenny Henry’s been in the news, obviously, totally coincidence. He’s writing a book, but apparently he seems to believe that the UK should be paying reparations for slavery. I’m not quite sure what you think about that. mean, my personal opinion is, is…

I don’t think that we should be paying any reparations. I’m not quite sure what reparations is about, if I’m honest. I mean, what’s your take on the whole reparations debate?

Justine Thomas (01:52)
reparations surely are just a, they’re seen as a financial way to right some historic financial wrong, but maybe a sort of moral wrong. But ultimately, how can anybody today be held accountable for the actions of people hundreds of years ago when the victims of those actions are also not alive today?

So in terms of colonial reparations, we’re talking about an environment and societies that existed many, many years ago. None of those people are here anymore. So I’m struggling to understand in terms of the moral sense of the word, surely there’s got to be a statute of limitations on when we can be held accountable for people who’ve been morally offended by something that took place. But I suppose

GT (02:30)
you

Justine Thomas (02:46)
people from those nations have an argument to say, well, because of the slave trade, for example, ⁓ those countries ⁓ suffered under the slave trade and therefore there should be some kind of financial remuneration. I I’m sure there’s another side of the argument that says that without colonialism, some of the countries in question…

might not be as advanced as they are and may not have had the sort of inward investment that they’ve had over the last hundred years, for example. Now, I don’t think that excuses what happened with regards to the slave trade, but the British actually abolished the slave trade. So they were leaders in the ⁓ abolitionist movement. So, yeah, I don’t think the claims for reparations are very credible.

I don’t think they’re very fair. I certainly don’t see why I should be paying, for example, maybe higher tax to pay people in another country who were not living and have no memory of the things that they’re talking about that they need reparations for. What do you think?

GT (03:59)
Well, it’s just generational discrimination, isn’t it? my main question would be, who are you paying the reparations to? are you just, who is it that you’re, is it just some people that have got documented proof that an ancestor of theirs was a slave? Are you going to pay reparations? Are you going to make black slave owners?

and the descendants of the black slave owners pay reparations because they were black slave owners. ⁓ Are you going to make

Justine Thomas (04:32)
Well, didn’t most

of the black slaves came from Africa and were they not black slavers?

GT (04:36)
Well, yeah,

most of the slaves that were taken to the United States or to the West were sold by African tribes to the Europeans for them to transport. mean, don’t forget, obviously, UK played its part, our biggest, well, my interpretation is the biggest role that we played was transporting them. You know, the UK wasn’t full of slaves. mean, a lot of people who

Justine Thomas (05:04)
There were never

any slaves. There were never any slaves in the sense of what we’re talking about in this context. mean, obviously we have modern day slavery, blah, blah. But in terms of this particular issue, there were no slaves in Britain. Yeah.

GT (05:07)
I don’t think they were not in the UK.

Well, there’s more slaves now than there were back then, apparently. mean, modern

slavery, there’s more slaves now. But I mean, the UK, obviously, territory that was owned by the UK that had sugar plantations and stuff like that had slaves, but there were no slaves really in the UK. But if you were going to pay reparations to Lenny Henry, for example, I mean, his parents came over to the UK in the 1970s and Lenny Henry’s kids will probably have…

just as many opportunities to achieve in this country than any white person is going to have in the current climate. I mean, if you look at the most disadvantaged people in the UK at the moment, it’s working class white teenage boys. So in terms of reparations, why would we pay any reparations? I mean, I don’t see why someone from African heritage would have any less opportunities in 2025 than a white

English boy, so why are you actually being paid reparations? Because what are you losing out on in 2025? I never owned a slave. know my dad didn’t own a slave. My grandparents didn’t. mean, as far as I’m aware, most of our relatives, generational, going back to 300 years, were Welsh farmers. So where have we benefited from slavery?

A lot of people will try and make you believe that the whole of the United Kingdom was built on slavery as well. Well, we didn’t have slaves building our country in the 1800s. They were in the Caribbean islands or America. And some of the biggest slavers were Brazil. It was actually Portugal and Brazil that, know, Portugal was sending over slaves to Brazil and Brazil was…

Justine Thomas (07:03)
Well, I’m sure there are

people who think we should be paying reparations to them as well, even though we’ve never had anything to do with Brazil. I’m well, think, yes, I mean, clearly that we’ve just £100 million for condoms to Pakistan. mean, I can’t quite get my head around that. mean, Pakistan’s got nuclear warheads. It’s got nuclear weapons. Why on earth are we transferring money from our country to a nuclear power? I mean, if they can afford nuclear weapons, they can afford condoms.

GT (07:09)
Well, we should just pay everyone. Pay everyone everything. ⁓

Mm.

Well, there’s residents

in Mauritius that don’t have to pay income tax now because we’re sending billions of pounds over to them and we give them some nice little islands to boot as well. I think it’s just a running theme, isn’t it? That the UK or mainly England is just awful, horrible. know, throughout history, we’ve just raped and pillaged everybody and we just need to pay everything back, give everything back, just give everything to everyone.

I don’t know, just all jump off a cliff. don’t think everyone, and no one will be happy until every English man has literally just gone, do you know what? I’m gone, just jump off a cliff ⁓ and just be gone with you. England’s gone. I mean, it does feel like that sometimes. As an Englishman, you do feel like you are the villain in every story. You’re like the main character villain. We’re like, Dr. No, we’re the Dr. No of the world.

Justine Thomas (08:01)
What? ⁓

And England’s gone.

Well, I

GT (08:24)
And it’s always the English people, the bad guys in American films. Now that I think about it, we’re just evil.

Justine Thomas (08:24)
unless…

Well, actually,

there was, no, and there was that whole thing a while back about when they had the ads on the London Underground showing the predatory males who were all kind of young, well-dressed white men. And then Sarah Poachan obviously made her comments about the number of people of, I can’t remember the exact term that she used. I think she just said the number of black people.

GT (08:41)
Yeah.

Justine Thomas (08:54)
in advertising and she said, oh, I’m sick of seeing it sort of thing. think exceptionally clumsy language, but you do see so many people who are non-white on adverts. mean, it seems like every family on an advert is mixed race. I mean, we’ve got a mixed race family, so we’re not bothered. I don’t care what race anybody is, but when you look at the TV, you would think there were no white people in this country.

And there’s all these lovely, you know, mixed race children. They’ve all got the prettiest parts of being mixed race. ⁓ But is that really reality for most people? So I think she was actually expressing a frustration around that. But you’re right, being white, yes, you are, you know, you’re the villain. you wear a St. George cross, you’re a knuckle dragging gammon, aren’t you? You know, or, you know, if you want to support anything British. But do you think that idea of… ⁓

This whole thing about reparations and colonialism, do you think in part that has come along and those ideas have gained more widespread traction? Because are we not in our institutions just, we’ve just bred this woke-ism, haven’t we, in society that has come from our institutions? That seems to be, you know, it’s in schools, it’s in our wonderful NHS. I mean, the BBC, I’m sure we’re going to get onto that.

But surely these are ideas, fine, let’s have ideas, let’s have conversations. David Lammy wants to have a conversation around reparations. mean, he’ll have a conversation around anything that seems to mean that we send money somewhere.

GT (10:38)
Yeah, but as a case in point, he’s

the deputy prime minister. mean, he’s a walking example of how a black person can achieve anything. I mean, he’s in the second highest post in the UK. He’s a black man and he is the deputy prime minister. So what is he saying? He needs reparations because he’s been held back. What, from getting one of the most senior posts in the whole country?

Justine Thomas (10:53)
Exactly.

GT (11:06)
It just doesn’t make any sense, does it? And a lot of white people are just sick of being vilified as just, you know, racist and just historically disgusting people. There’s a lot of different empires throughout history that did absolutely atrocious things. You know, if you look at the history, I mean, I’m not a historian, if you look, know, Mongolian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Japanese, Chinese, they had a couple of nasty wars together where millions of people died.

Justine Thomas (11:08)
Well, and-

GT (11:34)
You know, are we going to are we just going to pay reparations for everything? Are we just going to keep doing this big washing machine of money where we all just keep giving money to each other to apologize? mean, think Gandhi say an eye for an eye leaves the world blind. I mean, you just can’t apologize for who you are until the end of time. And I think as a white British, mainly man, that is all we are expected to do is just hate ourselves.

see ourselves as the villain and just spend the rest of our existence apologizing for anything and everything that’s ever happened in the world. ⁓

Justine Thomas (12:11)
Do think that’s turning around though? Because I feel like the tide is to… Do you? Well I feel like…

GT (12:15)
I think it’s getting worse. I think it’s getting popular.

Isn’t it getting popular now to hate Britain? It’s like becoming like in the same way that it’s fashionable to Palestine will be free kind of thing. It’s the same thing to hate Britain. know, and just what’s that thing? Is it proud eating?

Justine Thomas (12:34)
But if you hate me…

Self-flagulation. Is that what you mean? I don’t even think I said it. Flagulation. ⁓

GT (12:40)
Self-flagellation, yeah, whipping ourselves. Do you know what I mean? It’s like…

Well, I thought there

was a phrase called brow-beating.

Justine Thomas (12:50)
No, browbeating is what you do to somebody else, isn’t it? Like when you beat them down. Stop browbeating me, you know.

GT (12:56)
Yeah, we should ⁓ do

well. We have to do that as well to each other. We have to hate each other, hate ourselves and self-flagellate at every opportunity.

Justine Thomas (13:04)
But

yes, but do you think you’re just imagining that a little? mean, come on, look at this whole raising the colours, the whole thing with the flags. mean, yes, we know there are plenty of councils, they’re as fast as they’re going up, very desperate to take them down. And there’s councils, I don’t live in one, don’t live in an area, don’t think that’s particularly pro-Palestine. I don’t think there’s a massive pro-Palestine movement where I live.

haven’t seen any Palestine flags. They have them in Norwich occasionally when they get all the

GT (13:34)
I’ve got a billboard. I’ve got a billboard two minutes from

my house that’s got a massive Palestine flag on it. A billboard two minutes from my house. A billboard. It’s not even a flag. It’s a whole billboard with, yeah, on the main road. the junction 40. No, it’s a billboard. An actual rented billboard. But this is my point. This is my point. It’s crazy. A billboard of junction 40 on the M1 with a massive Palestine flag on it.

Justine Thomas (13:42)
Where is the billboard? Is it in a public space? Is it on somebody’s house?

Who’s paying for that?

GT (14:03)
So it’s like, yeah, it’s just very strange.

Justine Thomas (14:07)
That’s like

saying, and we had this conversation before when we talking about floods. So, you know, I think this whole thing around reparations and we’re moving on from that topic, but we are getting a little bit into the whole, no, no, no, no, that’s good. What I mean is we’re taking that forward, but we’re getting into the divide, you know, this whole thing. ⁓ the country’s so divided, it’s divisive. yeah, it’s divided between people who actually want to be British and are proud for Britain, are proud of Britain. They want to be British.

GT (14:15)
So.

Justine Thomas (14:35)
They’re proud of Britain, they’re proud of British culture, they’re proud of British values. And there’s those people, and then there’s the people it seems on the other side, who, as you say, seem to hate Britain. And I put them in a camp of many Labour politicians, but people who spend more time talking about Palestine and Gaza than they actually do in the neighborhoods where they actually live, spend more time jumping up and down, screaming about trans rights than actually of women’s rights who are like,

GT (15:03)
you

Justine Thomas (15:04)
you know, over 50 % of the population. And you’ve just got this kind of weird group of people who subscribe to some concept of international law rather than our identity, our culture and our history. And that should be the leading and the guiding force in everything in our country, you know, from parliament down to all of our institutions.

That should be first and foremost. we don’t have a written constitution. Well, we do have a written constitution, but it’s written in flexible instruments, if you like, such as acts of parliaments and statutory instruments and conventions and all those things. But ultimately, those institutions that feed into that have become infected by different types of ideology and ideology that isn’t British.

And I think, you you’re in two camps. You’re either British and you’re proud to be British or you’re British and you’re not proud to be British. In which case, literally go and find another country that you’re really proud of and go and live there and go and make that a success and take all your ideals and take whatever culture you’re inventing or what little history you want to cherry pick and go and take that there and go and build your own nation state.

And I wish you well. I hope you’ll be very happy and you can live under the Palestine flag or the Pride flag or whatever flag you want, quite frankly. But in Britain, I want to live under the British flag.

GT (16:34)
Well, yeah, and that’s the problem as well. So if you’re ⁓ a non-white person who’s born in Britain, surely you’re living under the same benefits that were provided by whatever slavery provided for us as a white person is. So why would you get reparations?

Justine Thomas (16:47)
Yes, you are, but lots of

non-white people agree with what you and I are saying, but there are a lot of non-white people who won’t come out and say it because they’re worried about the approbation of their neighbours, families, friends, and they don’t really want to come out and say it, but they will say it to me in private. I just went and had an appointment a couple of days ago.

There were two women there, two medical women who are both second generation from India. they were talking about it and I was talking about some of the things that I think and they’re absolutely on the same page as me. And they’re not interested in all the pro-Palestine rubbish. And actually they think that we live in Britain and people should integrate and that’s the end of it, quite frankly. And their attitude is, well, if you don’t want to do that, why on earth are you living here?

GT (17:42)
Mm.

Justine Thomas (17:45)
Well, I’ll tell you why people are living here, because they want all the benefits of all the freedom that a democratic country like Britain gives them. But they want that and then they want to take it for themselves and they want to shut everybody else down. So they want to use the freedom that we have in our democracy to actually silence the very people who support the unfettered freedom and democratic rights in the first place. And that’s just wrong.

GT (18:11)
Mm.

Well, yeah, there’s a lot of different angles, isn’t there, to it all. But at the end of the day, to finish, a finishing point, I think the reparations argument is mainly ⁓ just another opportunity to give money to someone else. It’s a money making idea. I just can’t see any reason to be paying compensation to people that haven’t experienced that issue for over 200 years. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Justine Thomas (18:44)
Yes, it doesn’t make any sense and as a segue in terms of spending money that doesn’t make any sense, what are your thoughts on the pay-per-mile idea that apparently is going to come in at the budget? Now I’m not as critical as this idea personally as when I looked into it as I thought I might be, but have you heard about it? Do you know what’s being proposed?

GT (19:08)
I’ve heard I’ve heard. basically they want to start charging paper math for electric vehicles. Yeah, I mean, it’s isn’t it? It’s a bit of a road back because I thought they were trying to convince people to buy electric. Electric was the you know, the way forward. It was going to be the cheapest way, even though people spend, I think, double the amount paying for these electric vehicles because they weren’t going to have to pay road tax, which I just always thought was stupid anyway, because isn’t road tax use?

Justine Thomas (19:15)
Yes. I think it’s on all vehicles.

GT (19:38)
to maintain the freeways, the highways, the motorways, know, potholes, making sure the roads are marked up and signed up correctly. So not paying road tax on an electric vehicle never made sense to me. It was unsustainable. But the fact that they’re now going to do the… I don’t even know how they’re going to do it. I mean, how are they going to do it? How’s it achieved? mile. Do have to have a GPS tracker? Do have to have… Can I just wrap my car up in tin? I mean, I haven’t got an electric car, thankfully, but…

Can you just wrap your car up in tin foil and it doesn’t know, you you can’t be tracked as it work? Is it cameras? How many billions are we going to spend to implement it or trillions?

Justine Thomas (20:15)
my understanding is, think you’re right, because there has been a huge loss of duty on fuel because of all the electric vehicles. So obviously, yeah, it was never sustainable, was it? So my understanding is that every year you’ll fill in a form. So you’ll pay your VED, your vehicle excise duty, which I think is 195 pounds a year. So you’ll pay that every year.

and you will log and say how many miles you think you’re going to do. And my understanding is you’re going to have to pay three pence a mile. So if you expect that you’ll do 10,000 miles a year, you’ll pay 300 pounds. And obviously the criticism of that is, well, that’s a big brother state, know, pence per mile is all very, you know, the conspiracy theorists will all be saying that it’s a clown swab, you know, no brainer. It’s a whole weff thing. We’ll beat social credit system, all of that.

But ultimately it makes complete sense. If you’re not making money from fuel duty, if people are not putting fuel in their cars, then you have got to raise that revenue for the roads somewhere else. actually electric vehicles, aren’t they heavier? So my understanding is that they actually produce more wear and tear per mile on the roads than what an ordinary… ⁓

in ICB and ICE, internal combustion engine would do. But I think the problem is what they’ve identified, because of course these ideas come out and then people immediately say, well, this doesn’t make sense because of whatever. So if you take your car abroad, there’s no way of knowing that that mileage didn’t occur in the UK.

GT (21:34)
Wow.

Justine Thomas (21:51)
So let’s say I live in Northern Ireland and I travel over to Ireland every day for my commute. Well, it sounds like I’m to have to pay for the mileage that goes into Northern Ireland. If I like to go to the Calais wine superstore a few times a year or go beyond there or drive to the south of France or whatever, all of that mileage is now going to be captured on my odometer. So I’m going to have to pay for it, even though I wasn’t actually driving in the UK. So I can’t see any way around that.

GT (22:18)
And you’ve

just discovered the way that they’re going to get us back into the EU. That’s going to be their excuse now. We’re going to have, we need to rejoin the EU to deal with this mileage issue. I mean, the problem is it was kind of a carrot and stick thing, wasn’t it? They told everyone to buy the electric vehicles because it was going to be a lot cheaper. So people went out and spent upwards of maybe 15,000 pounds extra to get an electric vehicle based on the fact that they thought in the long term they were going to save money.

But it was ridiculous to think that you could sustain people not paying tax on the fuel. it was always going to it was always I don’t want to call it Ponzi scheme, click one, but it was always kind of like a short sighted vision, wasn’t it? know, so anyone who’s now bought an electric car thinking that they’re going to save money is now kind of being backstabbed by the by the government. this is exactly the kind of thing that she’s going to bring in.

Justine Thomas (23:02)
Yes. Yeah.

So do you think then, should they get rid of, I mean, I don’t like the idea, as you know, I’m super, super small state lady. I don’t like the idea of anything being tracked by the government. However, I do accept that the only way to charge people per mile is you’ve got to find a way of working out what the mileage is. ⁓

GT (23:37)
I actually have

the answer. I do actually have the answer.

Justine Thomas (23:40)
go on.

GT (23:42)
It’s something no one’s ever thought of. I’ve never heard this idea before. Basically, this is how we get around the whole thing of fuel duty. No issues. Everything sorted till the end of time. So basically, Elon Musk, if you’re watching this, this is my idea, OK? So basically what you do when you buy your what they do is they start making electric cars that have quick release batteries in them, you know, like a Dewalt drill.

where you get that lithium battery and you press the thing and you take it off and you replace it with a new battery. Ryobi, Makita, yeah. So what they do is as they get rid of the petrol stations, they hollow them out. And instead of having petrol pumps, they have little rails that you drive over. And then when you buy the electric car, you don’t actually own the battery. You just own the car. So when you go to the petrol station, you drive over the grid,

Justine Thomas (24:11)
Yes. Ryobi, other brands are available.

GT (24:37)
and you have two guys at the bottom. They don’t fill your pump anymore. Basically what they do is they have this little lift there they go in, they detach the battery from the car. They put it in a charging rack. Then they get a new battery that’s charged up and you put that into your car. They seal you back up quick and you’re on your way within five minutes. You’re not sat in a charging bay for 20 minutes. You’re just in there. yes. now, yeah, but the thing is what happens is, is you pay

Justine Thomas (24:58)
Right, so it’s a Tesla slash Dewalt slash Pitstop.

GT (25:06)
Every time you get your battery changed, you’re paying for the maintenance of the battery, the electricity and the labor costs of those guys doing it. So maybe you pay the same price as you would pay to fill up fuel. So people would accept, wouldn’t they, £50 to refill to get 700 miles ⁓ range out of their vehicle, because that’s what it costs in fuel, ⁓ depending what car you’ve got. So you’d go, you’d pay 50 quid.

You never own the battery. And that means that when batteries degrade, they could be recycled responsibly, looked after and maintained. And you can collect the tax. That for me is the no brainer. You basically just check. So just make turn cars into Dewalt batteries basically or Makito or Aobi.

Justine Thomas (25:50)
So that sounds.

Right,

so if that was left to the private sector, that would work quite quickly. But as soon as you get the government involved, it’s just going to go wrong, it?

GT (26:02)
We don’t get the vote. Just the

government can just take that. So every time a battery is replaced, there’s a certain amount of tax that gets paid to the government. And that’s something that they can change. Rachel Reeves can change that. They’re going to say, we need to take £10 per battery change on a vehicle now. But what they could do is manipulate, not manipulate the market, but manipulate.

Justine Thomas (26:12)
Hmm.

Yeah, but that doesn’t help

you. Yeah, no, that’s a stupid idea. No, because that’s a good idea for… No, no, no, no, no, So that is a good… In fact, that’s a great idea for convenience of the driver. So you’re not waiting around for your car to charge. And by the way, anybody watching or listening to this who claims they don’t care when they have to sit and wait for their car to charge is talking a load of rubbish. Melody, you know who you are. I’m not buying it.

GT (26:26)
Right. Whoa. Whoa.

Exactly. Crap.

I love filling my big

truck up and looking at the guys sitting in the electric aisle and just like, you know what I mean? I’ll be done in about one minute, 45 seconds. Yeah, and they all look peed off, all of them.

Justine Thomas (27:01)
Exactly.

Melody always says to me, no, it’s fine. It’s fine. You just get a coffee. No, she’s lying. I can tell. Anyway, so I know I think that’s super convenient.

GT (27:08)
yeah.

My wife’s giving birth, let me quit fill up, because I’m

on empty. Fuel, 30 seconds. The other guy’s like that on FaceTime in his car. You all right, love? I’m just filling the Tesla up. I’m on my way. Get out of it.

Justine Thomas (27:28)
So I think the Dewalt battery idea is great from the user’s perspective. Very good. But yeah, from a revenue raising perspective for tax revenue, well, what about people who charge at home? That doesn’t make any sense then.

GT (27:42)
No, you ban it. You can’t fill up at home, Justine. Well, who’s got a fuel pump at their house? Nobody.

Justine Thomas (27:42)
So what you’re saying is the… You’re band charging at home?

to be… No, now you’re making me leave my property to go to a filling station to change my battery. Why should I have to do that? No, it’s not. I can charge it at home. No, it doesn’t. I’ve got an electric car. It’s rubbish. It’s awful. I hate it.

GT (27:57)
Well, is that is that’s how it works now, just because that’s how it works now. No, no. But before we had before we had this ridiculousness, it’s not rubbish. Yeah.

But what I’m saying is, is you’re going to have to now don’t don’t think that people aren’t going to be able to hack these cars as well, you know, to bring down the mileage. mean, it’s all software driven now. It’s not mechanical anymore. Your wheels turn and your mileage goes up on your on your on your odometer or whatever it’s called.

You literally just have a digital display.

Justine Thomas (28:27)
The

GT (28:28)
Odometer. Odometer. Odometer.

Justine Thomas (28:31)
Isn’t it an odometer?

GT (28:33)
I thought it was an odometer. O-D-O. I’ve never said the word. I just know how it’s spelled, but I’ve never actually said the word. Odometer then. Your dashboard. Your dashboard. G-Clock. The mileage finger. So the mileage finger is a digital display. mean, people are hacking, you know, someone hacked Barclays Bank, they, last week?

Justine Thomas (28:35)
I’m tired.

It’s a domiter. It’s a domiter. The mileage count. The clock. The trip. The clock.

⁓ people

aren’t going to start hacking their cars. That’s silly. Right. Here’s the thing. No rubbish. No.

GT (28:58)
Change the batteries. It keeps the control. It keeps the control

in-house. The batteries are maintained by the private companies and they pay their tax to the government. Everyone has to do the same thing.

Justine Thomas (29:08)
But there’s too many private, no,

no, it’s a good idea in theory, but it’s not going to happen. There’s too many private companies. And quite frankly, if I’ve got a niche car,

they may only have a charging station in, you know, 10 miles away from me. Well, I’m not going to drive. I haven’t got time to drive all the way down there and change a battery.

GT (29:25)
Well,

maybe think about implementing the infrastructure before you change the whole country’s driving habits.

Justine Thomas (29:34)
So my question to you on that topic though, just to finalize it is, is it fair?

to charge people per mile. And if so, why don’t we get rid of the 195 pounds for everybody? And why don’t you just pay per mile based on your car

why not get rid of that completely and make everybody pay for miles?

GT (29:52)
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think fairness comes into it, Justine.

I don’t think fairness comes into it. mean, nothing’s fair anymore, is it? anyone that thought PaperMile wasn’t coming in at some point has got half a brain. mean, everyone knew PaperMile was coming in.

Justine Thomas (30:08)
Fundamentally, you not think though, regardless of the old Big Brother aspect of it, surely it’s fairer, is it not? That the people who use the roads the most should pay more or not?

GT (30:17)
No.

The

problem is, is once the government gets that power, it will be like what they do with beer and cigarettes. I mean, it’s an easy tax then, isn’t it, to raise just to generate more money to then squander it. You you look at the price of beer in a pub now, I mean, look what they’ve done to the beer trade. They’ve absolutely, you know, decimated it because it, you know, it costs six pounds for a pint of beer now because they just… And how much of a pint of beer is taxed? I reckon it’s about half of it.

is just tax on the beer. You can’t even get a decent stellar anymore because they’re lowering all the percentages because of the tax on high percentage alcohol. I just feel like once they get a hold of that power, it’s going to be very easy to abuse it, is all I’m thinking. I don’t think in principle it’s a bad idea.

Justine Thomas (31:11)
going to

do it anyway, but they’re going to do it anyway, that’s the point.

GT (31:16)
on movement. What if I wanted to borrow someone’s car and I said, look, I’ll fill your tank up and I fill him up a a tank of petrol and go out in his car. How’s that going to work now then? Because I can’t do that now. What if you lend your car to someone? Who’s paying the bill then? How do you assess that?

Justine Thomas (31:34)
I guess you’ve

just got to, well, you’re just going to have to tell them they’ve got to give the 3p a mile. But I think a lot of people, I mean, I’ll be with my car when they ask me, I’ll be saying I’m going to do one mile next year and I’ll be paying them in arrears. But they’ll probably do a thing where it costs more if you pay them in arrears, won’t it?

GT (31:52)
Well, that’s what I’m saying with this government. If you thought that it would be a fair system where everyone kind of paid the same and it would never get abused, you’d be up for it, wouldn’t you? But you just can’t trust the government to ever do the right thing.

GT (32:07)
if they’re not going to abuse the system, if they’re going to keep their promises, ⁓ have a system where they have a base rate and it only changes with inflation, for example,

then I would be happy with that, but I don’t trust them not to break the promises. In the same way as Rachel Reeves is breaking her manifesto promise by the looks of it, ⁓ where she’s kind of softening her soul up with that little speech she did the other week, or last week.

Justine Thomas (32:34)
What was the, what was, that was Tuesday. What was the point of that speech? It was Tuesday.

GT (32:37)
Was it Tuesday?

sorry. No, I don’t know. What, what, what, you tell me what the point was, because I just heard… What did Cammie, Cammie Bader not call it?

Justine Thomas (32:46)
I think she’s sick of seeing

Nigel Farage. She’s sick of seeing Nigel Farage and then just that she just, he gives a press conference and she’s got, he gave his big press conference about what reform are going to do around the economy when they’re elected. And he gave a press conference. He was brilliant by the way. I don’t know if you saw it. It was very, very good. I mean, he just stands there for 45 minutes. He’s got some notes and a marker pen.

GT (32:54)
waffle bum.

I did. I watched it.

Justine Thomas (33:16)
And boom, bada boom, away he goes. And he does that because he actually knows what he’s talking about. He knows his onions, he knows his stuff, and he believes what he’s saying and he doesn’t waver from what he’s saying. And then of course, she suddenly had to come out and do a speech the next morning. And then didn’t Kemi Badenok do a speech for that last, did about three minutes. So.

GT (33:35)
They’re all playing catch up, aren’t They’re all playing catch up. But

the thing is, it’s like they’re out of their league. It’s like Nigel Farage has just got the drop on him all the time and they’re just constantly playing catch up. But they’re not doing their speeches based on any type of ideology or what they believe in, you know, because like you said before, I don’t think they believe in anything. They’re just doing it purely because Nigel Farage has done it. But I did watch Nigel Farage’s speech and when he was talking, he very clearly outlined

where he thought the issues were in the economy. And he very clearly outlined what his vision was ⁓ on how he would solve those issues, where he would take the money from, how he would make things fairer. And you got the impression that he actually had a vision. whether that vision is going to work or not, we don’t know. But he has got a vision and you can tell he believes in what he’s saying. But when Rachel Reeves was talking,

She actually didn’t, I couldn’t hear that she actually made any points whatsoever. She talks in these kind of like, you know, very broad terms, you know, we’re going to have to make hard decisions. Well, that isn’t a policy saying that we’re all going to have to share the burden and make hard decisions. Making hard decisions isn’t a policy. It’s just something we do. And that’s the difference between what Nigel Farage was saying in terms of, well, this is where I identify,

Justine Thomas (34:55)
Yes.

GT (34:58)
for example, the financial sector. He was very clear. was saying our biggest ⁓ sector is the financial sector in London. He says, we never talk about it. And it’s it’s caught up in bureaucracy and red tape. Yeah, but he said, but he had a clear vision. He said, you know, I’m going to undo this red tape. I’m going to get rid of all the bureaucracy, you know, that surrounds this industry. And I want us to become a powerhouse again.

Justine Thomas (35:10)
Oh, we’re embarrassed. We’re ashamed. We’re ashamed. It’s probably got some colonial thing going with it.

GT (35:27)
Rachel Reeves is just going, you know, the Conservatives really bad, we really good, we good guys, them bad guys, we all need to work together. But didn’t actually say anything. Once you go in for like 45 minutes and no passion. Same as Keir Starmer, sorry to interrupt, But it’s the same with Keir Starmer, she was like a cyborg. It’s like it was a 12 year old. And that’s how it comes across. It was like a 12 year old that was doing

Justine Thomas (35:42)
It was really…

Yeah.

GT (35:55)
her first speech and the teacher’s assignment was, pretend that you are the Chancellor and I want you to write a speech about how you’re going to change Britain and this 12 year old girl, we are all in this together and don’t forget, we are going to deal with this because Conservatives, it was just awful, wasn’t it? And embarrassing.

Justine Thomas (35:59)
You

Yes.

And it was, what was really, really intriguing was if you actually took the sound of her speech and the rhythm of that speech and all of it, and if you overlaid it over a…

Kier Starmer speech and got an AI voice to do the speech, it would have sounded exactly the same. If you’d taken her voice and AI’d it, but turned it into Kier Starmer, it was like they’d had exactly the same speech coach for her to do this speech. And it was really bizarre because she just sounded like, literally sounded like a female Kier Starmer. And he’s terrible at giving speeches.

GT (36:58)
Can you remember when I was taking the mic the other last week when I was saying about Keir Starmer? When he says these lines that where he’s trying to humanize himself and he goes, let me be clear, you know, and he kind of leads in with that. I’m not messing about, let me be clear. And she did exactly the same things. You’re right. She sided exactly. And why do they all sound like they’ve got blocked noses all the time? Why do they all sound like they’ve got nasal issues? So they can’t even talk properly, but she literally.

Justine Thomas (37:10)
Yes. Yes.

Yes.

GT (37:25)
Like I say, weird. but it’s the same as Keir Starber. You could have a cybernetic clone of her and it would look more human and sound more human than she does. It’s just very, very strange. But what did, did you pick up on anything she actually said of any merit where she had a solid policy other than just literally stroking you?

Justine Thomas (37:26)
Ed Milivand, I mean. ⁓ Mr. Adenoids.

Yes, yes, yes. It’s not about

people with the broadest shoulders anymore. Now it’s everybody. That’s the message. I mean, this is the very woman who clobbered all of the businesses last year. Why does she think that there’s no confidence in the economy? Why are people who’ve got businesses not even trying? Why would you bother trying if there’s no real reward at the end of it? Who bothers? Why do people bother?

GT (37:55)
But what does that even mean? I mean, the richest…

Well, why don’t we do this, Rachel Reeves? Why don’t you just stop spending money? Just stop spending loads of money. Stop! Stop! I mean, isn’t the interest on our national debt now more than the defence budget? Literally, you know, what we’re doing, from what I hear, they are… Well, no, we haven’t even got an army anymore. We’ve not even got an army. But what I’m saying is…

Justine Thomas (38:22)
Yes! Exactly! Exactly! Exactly!

Yes.

Well, we’re not defending ourselves, are we? But that’s another conversation, but yeah. I think we’ve got 75,000

armed service personnel, haven’t we? I think that’s the number. Or that could just be the army. I feel like it’s the whole of our military’s 75,000 bonds.

GT (38:48)
Yes.

The problem is they tried to make changes to the welfare system, didn’t they? And the bank benchers just basically said no. So again, they’re just a toothless dog. mean, they can’t stop. They can’t reform anything because the Labour Party is kind of like the Conservative Party was. It’s split, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve got people who are openly talking about dethroning Keir Starmer now. So they’re going down exactly the same road as Conservatives went down, which is now

Justine Thomas (39:12)
Yes.

GT (39:21)
you know, being a divide parties within parties just being totally divided. And that’s the thing with reform. People go on about reform is a one trick pony and that, you know, it’s all about Nigel Farage. Well, I don’t see that as a negative. I see that as a positive because Nigel Farage is something that we haven’t got and that what we need. is a leader. He is a leader. And people say it’s difficult. People do say sometimes it’s difficult to work with. He’s very, you know, you do it my way or the highway.

Justine Thomas (39:42)
Yes.

GT (39:48)
Well, sometimes that’s what you need. This country is yearning for a leader, someone who’s going to make tough decisions. I mean, you know, we all had that, you know, teacher in school that was all right, hard ass and really strict and would sometimes, a lot of the times would tell you no or say, you know, you couldn’t do things when you wanted to do it and was very strict with you, but you respected them. And they’re the kind of people you look back at and go, well, yeah, they were a bit of a hard ass, but I respect that person because at least they had conviction.

Justine Thomas (40:17)
Yes.

GT (40:17)
you know,

and they forced you to, and that’s, that’s how I see Nigel Farage. I don’t want him to flip flop. I don’t want him to flip flop. I want him to do more, more of what he did the other day, which is have a vision and follow through on that vision. And I think if he just continues to do that, it will be great. It’ll be great.

Justine Thomas (40:20)
Yeah, I agree.

Is it?

And he has rode back from those original promises or what Reform UK call their contract, the manifesto from 2024 in terms of ⁓ tax cuts. He actually rode back from that. And I think that’s acceptable. mean, we’re a few years out from a general election, unfortunately. Yeah, he’s being honest.

GT (40:52)
Yeah, but he’s being honest, isn’t he? That’s what you need a bit of honesty. He basically says,

look, we wanted to do this, but, you know, we’re probably if we’re in power, we’re going to inherit an absolute sack of whatever. Do know what I mean? So but but he’s being he’s being upfront, but he’s actually justifying the things that he’s saying. He’s saying, look, we need to get to where we want to get. But it may be so. I mean, even when he’s saying the amount of people they can deport, he said, well, deport.

Justine Thomas (41:03)
A mess. Sack of spuds.

Yes.

GT (41:18)
600,000 people in five years. I don’t think he said that’s part of his speech, but as an indicator, a lot of people might think that’s quite low. But some people might say, well, he’s just being realistic. That’s all we want is someone who’s open and honest about what they feel they can achieve and someone that won’t lie and roll back. I mean, if Rachel Reeves ⁓ hires income tax, I genuinely think she’s finished. I just don’t see how she could justify a position anymore if she breaks that manifesto pledge.

Justine Thomas (41:24)
Yes.

Yes.

⁓ It

was a silly promise to make to begin with. if they’d had some smarts, there were lots of other things that they could have done other than breaking that promise. And I think ultimately it was a silly thing to do to shoulder yourself with that level of manifesto promise, that the main headline taxes that working people pay.

that they will never increase. I think that was a silly thing to do. do you know what? I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I’m happy to pay for high quality public services, but what I and millions of other people are not happy to do ⁓ is that we are not happy to pay for government waste. And I am sick of public sector waste. And quite frankly, I see people on X and they say, ⁓ free meals for children. No, not free, taxpayer funded.

Again, I would make the same point. I want people themselves to be wealthier so they can take care of themselves. And it seems like these socialist governments, what they want to do is tax you to the hilt and then force you to claw it back in some kind of social credit or grant funding or something all the time. Just let people keep their own money and look after themselves. Thanks very much. And there are people who can’t…

GT (43:04)
Well, I haven’t got kids. Why am I paying for

someone else’s kids’ school dinners?

Justine Thomas (43:08)
Well, because you want to live in a civil society, maybe is one reason why you might choose to do that. I mean, you don’t have a choice to do it. But my argument would be, why are the parents of these children unable to feed themselves? What is it in their financial situation that means they can’t? Let’s look at that. But we want an economy that can prosper for everybody. And, you know, the whole thing of, let’s do a…

a windfall tax or let’s do a wealth tax. Well, yeah, it’s all very well until you run out of people to tax because eventually the people who pay this tax will leave or they will just find ways to squirrel their money into some kind of mechanism or vehicle, which means they don’t pay tax. And I think, you know, I’m happy to pay for public services when they’re good, but

And some public services are absolutely amazing. I I nearly fell over the other day and rang the Information Commissioner’s office about something and I got through to talk to a human and he spoke to me for 40 minutes. And I feel like if I’d wanted to talk to him for four hours, he would have just carried on. That’s probably a negative in some ways.

GT (44:15)
That’s because you’re the only person

who knows that service exists. Anyone else watching this wouldn’t even know what it is. So the guy’s probably sat there all day, just waiting for a phone call. So you probably made his day.

Justine Thomas (44:18)
Maybe. But waiting, he’s waiting for me to call.

Yeah. But, know, I am not happy to pay for waste and there’s too much government waste, all the net zero stuff, all the international overseas aid, it’s all getting filtered off and it’s all being used for things that ordinary British tax, tax pay…

It’s all being used for things that ordinary British taxpayers don’t actually want to fund. And I think people have just had enough of the waste as much as anything else. yeah, you’re right. She didn’t come up with any solutions. know, Nigel, it did impress me ⁓ at that press conference that he did. I was concerned about his comments on the two child benefit cap. He’s explained that now he’s expanded his arguments on that.

GT (45:11)
He clarified it, didn’t he?

Yeah.

Justine Thomas (45:13)
Yeah, and how that’s going to work. And yeah, I get that why, you know, I don’t believe.

GT (45:18)
And I

understand that he based that on the cost of childcare. So what he’s actually saying is we want to support people who are in work and enable them to stay in work by helping them pay for the childcare so they can pay tax. mean, again, it’s a policy with an explanation around it. It’s not going, well, we’re going to abolish the two child benefit cap because it’s not fair. You know what mean? It’s just, I’m sick of hearing like stupid.

Justine Thomas (45:29)
Exactly.

Yeah.

GT (45:47)
stupid statements like that where we’ve just got to do things out of fairness. Well, why can’t they just be a rational explanation why you want to do X, Y or Z?

Justine Thomas (45:47)
Yeah, well, and-

Well, yeah, and actually you want to make tax cuts or tax or government spending on areas of the economy that are going to benefit the most people that are going to enable people to be productive because the more we can enable the productive people to be productive, the bigger our economy will be and the more everybody will benefit. But quite frankly, when you’ve got all these people here in the country,

either non-British citizens who are claiming out of work benefits, people who came over to the UK who have come off the back of somebody else, people who are on visas who brought other people over and they’re now claiming benefits. mean, the whole thing there, the Boris ways of people, mean, that is just completely and utterly crackers. And quite frankly, I’m funding it and I don’t want to fund it. I think it’s morally objectionable.

GT (46:37)
Boris Wave.

But you want me to fund kids meals, but you don’t want to refugees meals.

Justine Thomas (46:50)
I should have to fund it.

don’t understand what you mean by that.

GT (47:02)
You, well, I said that I don’t want to pay for other children’s school meals. And you said, well, if we want to live in a civil society, then we’ll have to contribute. So you can’t say that I’ve got to pay for some kids meal at school, but you not pay for a refugees meal.

Justine Thomas (47:07)
Yes.

Well, do you mean asylum seekers or refugees? Because they’re actually two different things. But people who’ve entered to the country illegally, for example, yes, they need to get a meal, but those people should never be allowed to stay here and they should never be allowed to stay here and be claiming benefits. Why? They entered the country illegally. And of most of the people who came under the Boris wave, who were the workers in social care,

GT (47:35)
Can I say one thing?

Sorry.

Justine Thomas (47:42)
Nearly 60 % of those people are claiming, their family members are claiming benefits. So all of those, of all of those people, 59 % of that benefit bill went to the relatives of those people. So go figure that. Why are we paying for that? Come here and work if you want to. If I want to go and live in Australia, well, I’m too old now, they wouldn’t have me. If I want to go and live in Australia, I can’t.

GT (47:49)
And yeah, yeah, it’s bunkers. It’s unsustainable.

And it’s exactly the same. It’s a… And it’s exactly…

⁓

don’t you dare say she’s gone.

Justine Thomas (48:08)
say, can I bring my auntie, my

uncle, my brother and Uncle Tom Cobbly and all? They’d be like, well, no, you can come and work. And if that doesn’t suit you, stay where you are. Thanks.

GT (48:19)
Well, yeah, and my prediction is the same thing as the electric car scenario. Every time people were pushed to buy electric cars, people with half a brain said this is unsustainable and X, Y and Z is going to happen. We all knew that pay per mile was going to come in, is going to come in eventually. And it’s the same thing with this, with, you know, with the immigration. It’s unsustainable to keep paying thousands of people not to work. And as

know, 600 people came in on dinghies yesterday. Each one of those people that comes in on a dinghy costs about 40, 50 thousand pound a year to the UK tax payers in of hotels and, you know, food and phones and weekly payments. It is simply unsustainable. And if you’ve got half a brain, you know that it cannot keep going on forever. So it’s the same thing as the electric car scenario. You know what’s coming down the road. It’s just no one wants to accept it.

Justine Thomas (49:12)
Bankruptcy, think, is what’s coming down the road. I mean, I would like to, because we’re coming to the end So I’m going to have to give Shabana Mahmood some credit, because I don’t know all of the detail of it, but I do know that she’s clawed back £75 million of taxpayers cash that was overpaid.

two third party providers of accommodation and was sat there in their bank account, civil servants knew it was there, it’s all sat there in a ledger and basically the civil servants haven’t gone to them and said, by the way, do think we might have this money back? We’ve overpaid you, can we have it? So it’s all sat in a balance sheet and she has clawed that money back. So credit where credit is due, how she’s going to claw back the billions of pounds that have ever been spent, well, she isn’t, is she?

GT (49:31)
Ahem.

I can say it’s a drop in the

ocean, isn’t it? It’s a drop in the ocean.

Justine Thomas (49:55)
Well, yeah, but

it’s a drop in the ocean, but it still means something. That is money. That’s our money. That’s my money. That’s taxpayers money. And I don’t like this term all the time. You know, it’s a drop in the ocean because it’s not, you know, well, how big is the ocean at the end of the day? Who’s flipping feeding the ocean? Well, it’s the taxpayers. And there’s only so much ocean unless you start borrowing. And we know where all that has gone. ⁓ We know where that’s gone.

GT (50:20)
The only way to generate

money is to have motion in the ocean.

Justine Thomas (50:23)
I guess all that remains is just to say to anybody who’s watching and listening, we really hope you enjoyed the show.

and we look forward to seeing you next time. So if you did enjoy it, please subscribe to the show so we do know that we are talking to somebody every week. And don’t forget to share the show with your friends and also to give us a little like if you enjoyed it. Thanks very much and we will see you next time on The T-Word.