Why May's fuel duty freeze takes the Tories down a destructive dead end

The freeze will cost the Treasury £38bn over three years, money that could help fix the NHS, social care, or Britain's crumbling pot holed roads

Filling up: Britain's fuel price freeze will remain in place for the ninth year in a row (Getty)

The big news released to whet Britain's appetite for Theresa May’s Tory Party Conference speech? We’re going to freeze fuel duty for the ninth consecutive year.

We’re going to skewer you, your kids, and the economy through a destructive hard Brexit, we've turned our back on all the nation's other problems and we’ve nothing much to say beyond tub thumping nationalism, but hey, at least the price at the pumps will look just dandy. Assuming, that is, that world oil prices don’t increase, and that the fuel companies pass on any reduction if they fall. Which is something they're not overly fond of doing.

If that’s the best May can do then Jeremy Corbyn had best keep a removal van at the ready because he'll soon be taking over her Westminster lodgings.

There was something of an inevitability about this announcement because it provides an easy, short term win for a Prime Minister with a time horizon that extends only as far as waking up tomorrow morning in the digs that Mr Corbyn’s after.

It grabbed headlines and it had motoring organisations cooing (the President of the AA hailed the move).

It helps May with those Tories who see low taxes as the be all and end all. It facilitates her attempt to play the champion of ‘hard working families’ even if that doesn't stand up to any more than cursory scrutiny.

“A car is not a luxury,” she tells us. But for a lot of people it is. For those at the wrong end of austerity, who struggle to afford rent, food, clothes, it really is. May and her Tories have nothing to say to them. Quite the reverse.

Consider this too: The freeze will cost the Treasury £38bn over the next three years. That’s money that could go a long way towards securing the extra funds promised to an NHS in desperate need of them. It could help fix the social care crisis that is already leading to dire consequences for some of Britain’s most vulnerable people and their families. It could help reverse the fall in per pupil funding that’s having a deeply deleterious effect on the nation’s schools.

None of that take your fancy? In the motorist uber alles camp? How about fixing those potholes? The ones that wrecked the aforementioned AA's recent results because they've been wrecking people's cars. It’s not a lot of good having cheap fuel if your vehicle is stuck in the garage because the suspension is shot.

I could go on. A car is only “not a luxury” because the alternatives are so much worse as a result of the Conservatives under investment in them. Faced with commuter outrage over the disaster that is rail privatisation, the best Calamity Chris Grayling could come up with was a ‘review’. And you know what happens to reviews that don’t fit with the Government’s view of how things ought to be done. They get kicked into the long grass, like Matthew Taylor’s really rather limp attempt at fixing the iniquities of the gig economy.

Most people realise that if you want decent public services they have to be paid for through tax. That’s particularly true of those under 50 among whom Corbyn enjoys a huge poll lead. A cheap give away designed to grab a few headlines isn’t going to fool them. Nor will it have them returning to the Tories in their droves.

The fuel price freeze is yet another example of the May administration's backward thinking. It takes the Tories down a destructive dead end. That's obvious before we embark on a discussion about the deeply damaging effect on the environment - and people’s health - of too many cars crawling over crumbling roads and coughing up carbon and other muck as they do so.