WITH the sugar-coating now fast coming off Gordon Brown's widely-hailed Budget, the protest at the bitter pill it turned out to be for motorists and the truckers claiming its extra taxes will cost 50,000 jobs should signal at least two things to the government.

The first is that it has now reached the limit of public tolerance for punitive taxes on fuel.

The 86p the Chancellor taxes from every pound motorists spend on petrol is such a swingeing grab that the "green" excuse for it is wearing thin.

And the Tories have been quick to realise it.

Witness them making the issue the first of their new "kitchen table" initiatives as today they call on the government to stop "trying to tax motorists off the road."

The second is that instead of hitting drivers with yearly tax increases that are more than double inflation, the government must really go "green" with the £38 billion it is raking in each year and visibly invest it in providing proper alternatives to car travel and road freight and in freeing the roads from pollution and congestion.

For the reason that public patience with these ostensibly green tax blows is at its limit is because public investment in transport is pathetic.

The government is taxing motorists and lorry firms up to the hilt, but only spending a fifth of the enormous revenue from them on transport.

It talks and taxes green, but does not act it.

Look at the abysmal state of public transport, the railways in particular.

They provide no incentive for people to give up their cars and the tax penalties they suffer as a result are now only causing resentment.

So far, the government has only come up with a high-falutin' and watered down White Paper on transport.

It is high time it began spending green taxes in this country - when now it seems that they have reached the point where hauliers and thousands of jobs are being driven abroad where taxes are far less.

The political and economic backlash has begun, yet the cause for which all this tax pain is suffered - our environment - languishes.

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