[jambutty]

Originally Posted by Eric

So everyone is still blaming the oil companies and government; but the real culprit is us. GM doesn't send goons to force us to buy the big gas guzzlers. It's us the consumers who have squandered the oil with the SUVs and the pickups and the minivans and now we have to pay the price. There is a positive side to all this; we are being forced into conservation, forced by high prices to do what we should have been doing years ago. Whole new industries and opportunities are opening up in the "green" sector. Wherever you drive in Canada you can notice the increase in the number of hybrid cars, particularly the Toyota Prius. The extra tax dollars our governments, federal and provincial, are collecting are being passed back to the people in the form of reduced income and sales taxes, increased govt spending on health and education, and passed directly to municipalities for infrastructure improvements. And the point that was made about low taxes in the States: what would you rather have, cheap gas or govt. funded health care?

I don’t know about Canada but the majority of car drivers over here drive cars that they bought second hand because that’s all they could afford. Or if they did manage to buy a new car it is now several years old and replacing it with a new one is not an option.

The real villain of the UK is the government starting with Thatcher and egotistical Blair. Blair for thinking that he was a world leader and wasting billions (not forgetting lives) on two illegal wars. More billions on replacing Trident when we couldn’t fire a nuke missile without US approval and permission. Even more billions on an NHS computer system that has yet to work properly. Yet even more billions on creating unnecessary Quangos, plus still going ahead with a very expensive ID card system that not only no one wants but has been shown that it will have no effect in combating terrorism. Not forgetting more billions on issuing the police with equipment and a computer system to enable them to catch Road Tax dodgers, when the most cost effective system would have been to just increase the price of petrol/diesel and dispense with the Road Tax all together.

Thatcher for destroying our manufacturing industry so that people had to seek work well away from their homes. With a public transport system that became a joke people had no alternative but to turn to a car.

But I have to agree that we the electorate, or more accurately those who did not vote, must also share some of the blame.