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news
Penny Mordaunt (Michael Hughes/DFID CC Attribution 2.0 Generic)Conservative leadership candidate backed by controversial FairFuelUK — pledges 50% fuel VAT cut
Conservative Party leadership candidate Penny Mordaunt has announced the support of pro-motoring lobby group FairFuelUK, which calls for lower fuel duty for motorists, along with the news that she would cut fuel VAT by 50 per cent "immediately".
Mordaunt, who this weeked was backed as the early front runner in the race to succeed Boris Johnson in a poll of young Conservative members and is the current second favourite with the bookmakers, spread the news of FairFuelUK's backing on social media, saying she is "glad" for it.
Glad to have the backing of @FairFuelUK.
I will introduce an immediate 50% cut in VAT on fuel, reducing filling up the average family car by £10 per fill. #PM4PM pic.twitter.com/fnLoFZEGsv
— Penny Mordaunt (@PennyMordaunt) July 10, 2022
"Penny has been a staunch and loyal backer of UK's 37 million drivers and as an MP, is a founding supporter of FairFuelUK," Howard Cox, founder of FairFuelUK, said.
"I have known her for 12 years and truly believe she will deliver on the need for lower and fairer fuel taxation. She will introduce fairer incentives to drive cleaner, instead of inflicting ill-informed cliff edge, idealistic and costly punitive bans.
"I am also certain she will bring a large dose of common-sense fiscal tactics to reduce the pain of the cost-of-living crisis. Our leadership survey shows she is a popular choice to lead her party to what millions of new Tory converts wanted back in 2019.
"I am looking forward at long last, to working with a kindred spirit in creating an effective road user strategy that benefits the economy and UK's much-villified drivers."
FairFuelUK, which is funded by the Road Haulage Association and Logistics UK, boasts that it has saved drivers £165 billion in planned fuel duty rises.
In August last year the lobby group paid for and produced a report on behalf of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Fuel for UK Motorists and UK Hauliers titled What does the 2030 fossil fuelled new vehicle sales ban really mean to the economy, environment, and UK's 37m drivers?
In the report were repeated references to it aiming to give a voice to "the UK's 37 million drivers" – described as "hard-pressed" and "perennially demonised" and all for the benefit, apparently, of cyclists, supported by the policies of a "virtue-signalling government" and a "political bias […] towards cyclists, particularly in urban areas."
Just a week after the report's publication, Mr Cox accused Jeremy Vine of "politicising" cycling and "fuelling a war between drivers and cyclists".
One month later, Mr Cox blamed a "militant cyclist" for marking his house as a petrol station on Google Maps during the shortages of last September. While in February the lobby group's founder wrote that the "lunatic Highway Code" encourages road rage and gives cyclists carte blanche.
Mordaunt's campaign got off to a high-profile start after Paralympic athlete Jonnie Peacock was one of several public figures who asked to be removed from a promotional video.
The video also used footage of South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, convicted in 2014 of the culpable homicide of his partner Reeva Steenkamp after she was shot dead at the couple's home in Pretoria.
[Main image: Michael Hughes / DFID / CC Attribution 2.0 Generic]
Dan is the road.cc news editor and joined in 2020 having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for The Non-League Paper. Dan has been at road.cc for four years and mainly writes news and tech articles as well as the occasional feature. He has hopefully kept you entertained on the live blog too.
Never fast enough to take things on the bike too seriously, when he's not working you'll find him exploring the south of England by two wheels at a leisurely weekend pace, or enjoying his favourite Scottish roads when visiting family. Sometimes he'll even load up the bags and ride up the whole way, he's a bit strange like that.
Latest Comments
- S.E. 13 min 53 sec ago
Is the front wheel also locked, to make it so difficult to move them a few meters away?...
- IanGlasgow 18 min 35 sec ago
I used to cycle to school in the suburbs with those. They were useless....
- slc 1 hour 26 min ago
Joking aside, governments could require new cars to be fitted with smart ignition systems that operate only for a licensed driver. No doubt there...
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There is an increasing 'disconnect' between comments in this topic and reality. Cords are either all cotton or mostly cotton and are going to last...
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There are people out there who will make you the belt out of your old tyre.
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Furry dice and an air freshener for your helmet.
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Ah yes, those are hopefully not the 'master craftsmen' that has constructed a wide range of shoddy Italian cars and motorbikes over the years with...
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A SuperSix is definitely not an all-rounder....
- chrisonabike 11 hours 57 min ago
Just get them to walk a treadmill - or better, ride exercise bikes to power path lighting.
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Just in case anyone is interested in the tory leadership election and their commitment to active travel, Sky tv is having a debate with all the prospective PMs, and have asked for questions from the public, so I've bunged one in, emphasising the value for money and public support aspects amongst others.
If anyone else feels like doing the same, newsdebates [at] sky.uk
Given the real audience is Conservative party members I suspect we'll hear something more like "tough on cycling, tough on the causes of cycling" than "Bobby-dazzling Boris bikes for all".
I've always thought that cycling and road safety are potential open goals for any political group, but then there's "change" (mostly avoid) and "public opinion" (or rather - some noisy subset of that). And yes there are plenty of Conservative cyclists but it doesn't appear this is a topic that's important to the party - indeed maybe the opposite.
Can't a modern day Guy Fawkes character do the job properly and blow the lot of them to smithereens? Not just the Tories, but politicians of every hue?
Perhaps we could then have the great reset and start all over again with common sense policies that appeal to the masses, rather than the minority.
If that bloke can raise £6k for a new set of gnashers I reckon a gofundme appeal might be, errr.....appealing.
Well, I'm backing Nadine Dorres, Go Nads
Anyone ready to #BringBackBoris yet?
Many of the potential replacements are pretty terrifying.
Private Eye had a 'Number Crunching' today, comparing which potential Tory leaders are using their "My parents came here from another country and made a new life" story as a positive thing in their campaigning, and comparing that against which of them support "Let's send immigrants to Rwanda". Funny thing is how the Venn diagram would be a circle.
I don't get how any candidate for the leader of a party can promise all these things to just a few people. Surely any changes being made should have been in the manifesto being voted on by the general public, not by the members of one party which represent a fraction of a percent of the country.
Awwww - that's so sweet that you think that...
Liz Truss is stepping up her campaign: https://newsthump.com/2022/07/12/liz-truss-appeals-to-the-tory-base-with-commitment-to-murder-everyone-under-the-age-of-40/
I prefer the Priti Patel one:
https://newsthump.com/2022/07/11/priti-patel-crawls-out-of-television-se...
Yeah, I liked that, but she's not running for leadership now
Sajid Javid to be humanely destroyed after falling badly at first fence in Tory leadership race
https://newsthump.com/2022/07/13/sajid-javid-to-be-humanely-destroyed-af...
Priti Patel rules herself out of Tory leadership race to focus deporting Sir Mo Farah
https://newsthump.com/2022/07/12/priti-patel-rules-herself-out-of-tory-l...
I found it amusing that the Home Office have made a statement about Sir Mo: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62137599
I like this bit from the NewsThump article
I think it's bad, the way we all know that if Sir Mo was just Mo from the office, or Mo from the supermarket or something, the Home Office would be on him like a ton of bricks and he'd be on a flight to Rwanda before he had chance to catch breath.
Still time for our woke* PM to rescind Farah's knighthood and open that door.
* I actually saw a fox news clip last night where some english unknown claimed johnson had to go due to greta thungberg's influence on him and also being woke.
Statistically, anyone using "woke" unironically is 98% likely to be spouting complete rubbish
Is that the same Fox News that won a defamation court case by arguing that "given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statements he makes."
Which, IIRC, was summarised as "Well, if you are taking what we say as being actually true then that's on you, isn't it"
I clicked once to many times last night, just in time to catch apoplectic middle class white man from Tunbridge Wells (or somewhere else in middle England) being interviewed on GB news:
"If they open an immigrant hostel here we'll stop them when the get off the train and send them back, we don't want them here, it's far too dangerous."
They didn't ask him whether he was christian or not; I would love to have known that.
All of the contendors for Conservative Party leadership and PM were ministers under Johnson, and they all happily supported him until suddenly they didn't. I don't think we can expect any great changes to the status quo, whoever ends up
in the firing linesorry, in the Big Chair.It's time the Tories went into Opposition for a long time, preferably for ever.
There was a story in one of the papers yesterday, Number 10 was actually forced to publicly confirm that Johnson did not intend to stand as his own replacement in the leadership contest!
I think that was because Petronella Wyett made a joke in a tweet but it was taken literally !!
Oh, OK
They've been in opposition in Wales for a quarter of a century now.
The land of milk and honey it is not.
Jeremy Hunt?
Not all of them were. Tugenhat wasn't. He's considerably less unplatable than the others. That doesn't mean he'd be a great PM. He's just not a totally nasty piece of work.
It is worrying, though, that we are discussing the potential PM as "Well, he's not a total monster"
The problem with slashing VAT on fuel when wholesale prices are high is that it won't get put back up when prices inevitably drop.
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