TAXING TIMES

The annual ritual of receiving the official looking envelope containing content telling me that the car tax was due arrived recently, and I decided once again to go through the usual slightly angsty process of dealing with it online. This process is always fraught with danger, especially now as I’ve been reliably informed by those in the know never to trust government software systems and I imagine that the computers at the DVLA in Swansea are probably almost as out of date as mine is.

Those government websites are a load of fun, aren’t they…? Full of whiz-bang games and distractions to let you know how funky the government is. The pinstripe equivalent of a ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoon where you know that the ton weight is dangling somewhere above your head, but you just have to plough on anyway, regardless of the inevitable consequences.

There it sits, the friendly face of modern, interactive government, and not at all the grey and dreary bureaucracy you might think it is. Okay, that’s not at all true, is it? It’s full of bright and breezy colours that somehow bring the greyness and dreariness of that bureaucracy into sharp definition. It also seems full of traps to catch out the unwary visitor and the many, many legal disclaimers do make you wonder whether you should just click the “snap the cuffs on me guv’nor, you’ve got me bang to rights” button and be done with it.

Anyway, having traversed the electronic minefield and got myself to the correct point, I typed in my “unique code” (or at last I hoped it was unique) and checked it half a dozen times to make sure I’d put in the right actual number and clicked, and the mighty unseen machines of government rolled into action and checked their checks and compared their records and found that I was good to go and sucked the pennies from my account, much to the alarm, no doubt, of that nice young girl who was trying to persuade me to open a new one only last week.

Over 200 quid for a tiny circle of paper always seems a bit steep to me no matter what it might represent, especially as there aren’t any buses out here to speak of, and so car ownership has rather become a necessity rather than a luxury around here. Anyway, the usual worrisome few days waiting for it to appear via a visit from the “Shadow” (as our generic Postie is coming to be known) followed, but in the end it arrived without a hitch. There is, of course, the faintest whiff of the possibility that it might all prove pointless and I may very well have to shortly be trying the tricky process of attempting to get a refund as, within a month, the annual MOT test is looming. The current fear is that it might turn out to be a hefty one for our venerable vehicle, related work-wise, and there’ll have to be the now annual debate as to whether to bite the bullet with regards to the repair bills or bite the other, bigger bullet and head off into the great unknown that is seeking out an affordable replacement that won’t turn out to be on the brink of major surgery itself. Sometimes the devil you know is truly the better option.

I’ve never been in a financial position that was secure enough to buy a new car and I rather suspect that I’m never likely to either. More than one of my acquaintances has suggested that I should have taken advantage of the recent “scrappage” scheme but that was no use to me as, whilst the two grand would have been all well and good, raising the other twenty to buy the new equivalent to what I rattle around in now would have been all but impossible. As well as this, I don’t think that the only new car I could have afforded under that particular scheme would have been much use during the winter we’ve just endured. I doubt that it would have done much for the British car industry either, or the balance of trade, and then there’s the old environmental argument that it’s still better to keep an old car going rather than buy a replacement with all the carbon footprint that the manufacture and shipping of it entails. Sadly, the last time I spoke to him, the mechanic who nurtures my aging vehicle was lamenting the fact that so many perfectly good cars that might have had a good few years left in them were now rotting in fields because of that scheme, and that many of them were possibly in better condition than mine, and this has put a massive spanner in the works when it comes to acquiring good used cars for them to sell to people.

Another result of visiting the HMG website to go through this process (which, admittedly, is infinitely preferable to the old queuing up in the Post Office ritual of years gone by), is that I’m now fretting that I may have the only pink driving licence left in the country and await once more the coming of the jackboot at the front door. Well, it’s more likely to come in the form of a brown envelope with a little window, than an actual jackboot per se I imagine, but it still metaphorically caves in my skull in much the same way. The thing is that I haven’t moved house since the rules got changed, and therefore there’s been no real reason to change the licence, so why would I have done? But the language used on the site does rather imply that I ought to have done it anyway out of the goodness of my heart and in a terribly public-spirited way.

Of course, I shouldn’t be flippant about government power and be bandying phrases like ‘the scourge of the jackboot’ around willy-nilly when real people are actually being beaten and killed in the various battles for power that are happening in other countries at the moment. We have a lot to be grateful for that things do remain so relatively reasonable in general in our dealings with the mechanisms of the state, and, quite frankly if the mutterings of a few overzealous bureaucrats and the occasional confusing and stroppy letter is as bad as it gets in this fair country of ours, then, I for one do appreciate it, even if it does make me occasionally (or maybe continually if you ask my nearest and dearest) grumpy.

I just worry that the terminology that is used is always made to appear to be so stress-inducing, and even the possibility of making a slight mistake is made to sound as if it has the direst of consequences for the applicant and their own legal and financial position. After all, we’re all human, we’re all subject to the same frailties and we all occasionally make mistakes, so perhaps the electronic tax officer should wear a friendlier face, and give us a cheery smile even if it turns out that they have got that blooming great mallet hidden behind their back to pound us flat with.