GrasB said:
Foghat, Unfortunately you've completely missed the point of the whole argument as the point of not having 'road tax' is a conceptual one. The problem is 'road tax' seen by people as a tax that is paying for the road, this is a false & the view of VED as a road tax needs to be changed. VED is a licence fee to get access to public roads, one could call it a road access licence, & there are classes of vehicles that are exempt from paying for this licence. The very fact there are vehicles which are VED exempt in its self shows it's not a tax but licence fee.
On the contrary - I haven't missed the point at all. I was addressing the specific fallacy demonstrated in the thread that VED is somehow not a tax on motor vehicles for using the road, and hence a road tax.
The existence of this fallacy, and the attempted promulgation of the niceties and nuances of the legislation to the ignorant masses, are futile diversions from the crux of the matter - which is what you correctly identify as a conceptual one. However, trying to solve the conceptual problem by devising a 'suitable' term for the tax ('tax' being the term extensively used by the government after all, not 'licence') and convey this to the morons who contend that cyclists have fewer road rights on account of not paying road tax is a waste of time - virtually everyone already knows that cyclists are exempt and that the road tax applies to motor vehicles, even the most idiotic, and calling it 'VED' has made no difference to the prevailing attitude towards cyclists. You can call it what you want, but thinking the deployment of semantics is the answer is naïve as the masses will always call it a road tax because that's what it is, whatever else it also happens to be, and whatever the roads funding sources are.
This subject needs approaching more creatively, and getting away from the futile diversions of definitions and semantics which will never achieve anything. It needs a vocal, high-profile campaign to explicitly state that yes, cyclists are exempt from paying road tax on their bikes (which everyone already knows) because it's AN INHERENTLY GOOD THING as is more people cycling (and not drilling on about the technicalities of the legislation or roads funding sources or the utilisation path of road tax revenue, which will make most of the target audience's eyes glaze over in no time), and I would suggest the hot air generated by those futile linguistic diversions would be better spent lobbying the appropriate campaign groups and authorities to incentivise the use of bikes on the basis that,
inter alia, one of the benefits is ownership of a road-tax-exempt vehicle permitting free, untaxed (beyond income/council tax) use of the roads.