The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has urged Labour Party chancellor Rachel Reeves to start charging people per mile to use roads. The move would end the general principle of roads as free at the point of use.
The thinktank suggests the government should charge cars and vans at an initial rate of 1p per mile and 2.5p to 4p for lorries.
Tony Blair: start renting roads out
Now tony Blair’s organisation is using the projected increase in electric car use and the resulting loss of government revenue from fuel duty as an excuse to charge people for using roads.
But back in 2007 the former prime minister was also trying to introduce the road charging scheme. At that time, congestion was the excuse. And 1.8m people signed a petition against it.
The aim is the same: depleting the principle of infrastructure as the universally funded backbone of the economy, and moving towards infrastructure as an individually charged privilege. Indeed, TBI says that the road rental prices would increase in the years ahead. It’s mission creep.
Blair advises the Keir Starmer government. Still, a Labour spokesperson said “We have no plans to introduce road pricing”.
Privatising infrastructure
The thing is, Reeves and the Labour leadership agree with the move away from publicly funded infrastructure. It’s arguably even worse than TBI’s recommendation because they want to privatise the building of infrastructure, allowing companies to milk profit from what should be public development.
Reeves hosted the first meeting of the British Infrastructure Taskforce at No 11 Downing Street on 18 October. Whether this taskforce replaces the similar British Infrastructure Council she had already formed is unclear. Both are made up of private financers from banks such as Lloyds and HSBC and investment funds like BlackRock.
The goal is the usual: privatised profit, socialised losses. As the British Infrastructure Council admitted in a breakfast meeting in June:
Executives at the breakfast discussed ways in which the UK Infrastructure Bank and the British Business Bank, both taxpayer-owned, could be liable for the first loss on complex and long-running projects
One scheme Reeves is floating is private finance initiative (PFI)-style deals for building infrastructure. In the vein of TBI’s road rental charges, the government would introduce potentially indefinite user charges (tolls) to compensate private sector cost and profit.
Featured image via Tony Blair Institute – YouTube
