Hats off to the TaxPayers' Alliance for proving me right.

The Alliance has calculated that every household in Britain is paying £800 a year more in environmental taxes than is justified to pay for the environmental cost of their carbon emissions.
They say the government made £20 billion in "excess" revenue last year from supposedly "green" levies on motoring, energy bills and waste disposal.

Every time environmentalists have called for action to save the planet, the government have used them as a cover to create even more revenue-raising measures.

Not so in the rest of Europe and the world – we're leading the way in being screwed by government.

And as I wrote recently, we all know where much of that money goes – on feather-bedding people with benefits who should be helping themselves and not being a drain on the State.

The government is pouring money away in another direction, too, in ever more government spin.

We know Blair was brilliant at it, trying to turn any bit of bad news into something positive.

Dear Gordon is trying even harder (but not being very successful) – he's spending more on advertising and public relations than even Blair did.

£391m is being spent on advertising, marketing, PR and presentational work, an increase of £51m or 16 per cent.

It's wonderful, isn't it, that when we're all having to cut down, Brown sees fit to spend even more in an attempt to persuade us he's doing a good job!

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