AS a government purportedly pledged to policies that are in tune with the people, it is bewildering that Labour on the down-slope to the next general election should be setting out to enrage the 26 million of them who are motorists by seeking to price droves of them off the road.

For diverse though the legislative programme outlined in the Queen's Speech may be, it stands to be remembered at the ballot box most of all for being the vehicle that brought to Britain's already-exploited car-owners the extra charges that even now are being dubbed a "poll tax on wheels".

It may that the Government's opponents are fast exploiting this imagery with forecasts of drivers paying up to £5,000 a year more to use the roads - as councils are freed to charge them up to £10 a day to drive into busy urban centres and to slap taxes on their works car parks - but, no matter how much politically-driven exaggeration there may be in these figures, the backlash these measures are begging is because millions of drivers believe they are persecuted and fleeced enough as it is.

Even a jot more on their motoring costs could cost the Government extremely dear in votes and it is unlikely to escape the car-owners' wrath by passing the buck to local authorities for the implementation of these measures. It is curious that the Government is not so politically naM- ve that is has not already failed to recognise the motorists' discontent - witness its backing off from the automatic above-inflation rises in petrol prices every Budget - but it is perhaps also indicative of its hectoring disposition that cannot resist such punitive, thou-shalt methods to keep cars out of towns.

Yet the fact is that, for all the promise that these extra road charges will be used to improve public transport, drivers are well aware that for decades at least the alternative to them paying through the nose to drive themselves will be unreliable, unpleasant, inconvenient and even unsafe forms of travel.

Furthermore, when they are already forced to pay the world's highest prices for fuel and know that little of the 85 per cent-per-gallon tax is spent on roads or congestion-curbing by-passes and ring roads, they are unlikely to trust that councils will spend the new poll-tax-on-wheels revenue well or fairly either.

If war-on-the-car had not already been officially declared, it has now. And it may backfire immensely on its perpetrators.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.