[Cherie]

It's not really a cheering matter to motorists who were bribed into buying them as the government told them they were environmentally friendly

When I bought my diesel-powered Citroen C5 estate six years ago, the last thing on my mind was that I would end up being treated as an environmental vandal by a government minister.
The rates for road tax seemed to be encouraging me to buy a diesel car. With lower carbon emissions, my new car fell into a much lower taxation band than my old petrol- powered Peugeot 406.
It is quite a shock, then, to hear Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin warning motorists like me that we face a hike in taxes designed to punish us for doing what we thought was the right thing and buying a diesel car.
Mr McLoughlin now says incentives introduced by Gordon Brown in 2001, which led to the number of diesel cars on Britain’s roads more than doubling from 3.45 million to 8.1 million, were utterly misguided.
And he says diesel car owners will have to pay an extra tax in future to make amends.
His argument is based on the fact that, although diesels emit less carbon mile for mile than petrol cars, they emit dangerously high levels of particulates — tiny soot particles — and nitrogen oxides (NOx).
According to an estimate by Frank Kelly, professor of environmental health at King’s College London, diesel engines could be responsible for a quarter of the 29,000 premature deaths in Britain that are attributed to air pollution.
Chancellor Gordon Brown overlooked the problem diesels have with particulates and nitrogen oxides because, like many modern-day policymakers, he was obsessed with carbon emissions.
By encouraging drivers to switch to diesel engines using tax incentives, he thought he could help achieve the targets the Blair government had pledged on CO2 reductions at the 1997 Kyoto climate-change summit.
I can accept that Gordon Brown might have been misguided in his obsession with reducing CO2 by encouraging us all to buy diesel engines — an error which, incidentally, the coalition subsequently did nothing to correct.