Eddie Odaro

Every time we put petrol into our cars at a fuel station, the government are fleecing us. And it’s not just the fuel duty and VAT at the petrol pump price. £70 of petrol at 197.9p a litre buys just 35.37 litres - a partial fill for many cars. Of that £70, £18.73 is fuel duty and £11.67 is VAT. That is £30.40, or 43%, taken by the government before the engine starts. That £70 itself was already taxed. To have £70 left after 20% income tax and 8% National Insurance, you first earned roughly £97.22. Another £27.22 was taken at source. On this single fill alone, nearly 60% of the money you worked for has already gone to the government. It does not stop there. Most drivers also pay Vehicle Excise Duty of around £200 a year simply for the right to use the road. On top of that, the average comprehensive car insurance premium is roughly £650, of which 12% Insurance Premium Tax - about £78 - goes straight to the government. Add those annual charges and the government extraction of our money continues to escalate with endless stealth taxes. You earn the money. It is taxed. You spend what remains on fuel. It is taxed again. Then you pay again every year just to keep the car legal and insured…which is taxed. For millions who need a vehicle to reach work, drive children to school or live ordinary lives, this is no longer the cost of petrol or the cost of motoring. It is a stacked system of extortionate tax charges that repeatedly takes from the same earnings. Motorists are not merely paying for fuel. They are being systematically fleeced at every stage by the government. The cost of living crisis is also a cost of excessive government taxation crisis. So @andyburnham - if you really want to help cash strapped motorists during the cost of living crisis, drastically cut fuel duty and VAT on petrol and diesel rather than just giving advice to use google maps to find the cheapest local fuel station.

Use cash locally. Every card swipe sends a cut to a bank and a data trail to a corporation. Cash doesn’t. It stays in the shop, pays the staff and circulates on your high street instead of vanishing into fees and algorithms. No tracking. No outages. No middleman. Spend it where you live. Keep the money where it matters - in your own community.

The Great British Rip Off. We pay more for everything and what we get back is falling apart. Food is nearly 40% more expensive than five years ago and on track to be around 50% higher than mid-2021 by the end of this year. Olive oil has more than doubled. Beef, eggs, pasta and chocolate are all up by half or more. Diesel has just hit a record £2 a litre. Petrol is around 174p. A typical energy bill is £1,723 under the October price cap - 58% higher than winter 2021/22. £billions spent on importing oil and gas from Norway and the North Sea, while the government turns off the taps on new UK oil and gas licenses from the same sea. Gas rates are roughly 140% above mid-2021. One of the highest electricity rates in the world. The tax burden is at the highest since records began in the late 1940s and still forecast to climb even further. Employer National Insurance went up. Business rates land on the local independent shop. Retailers now hand over about 72p in business taxes for every £1 of pre-tax profit. Walk the high street and you can see where that money did not go. One in seven high street properties is empty. Hollowed out streets where proud local businesses used to stand bringing communities together. Over 70,000 UK shop closures since 2020. Retail jobs fell by 122,000 in two years. The UK hospitality sector has suffered a net loss of more than 16,000 licensed venues (including pubs, bars, clubs, and restaurants) since the start of the Covid in March 2020. A record 6,365 UK agriculture, forestry and fishing businesses closed in 2025 alone. Familiar names keep shrinking or vanishing - boarded windows, “to let” signs a vape shop where the butcher or the bank used to be. The places that held a town together are being taxed and costed out of existence while you are told the economy is being “supported.” The roads tell the same story. Councils in England and Wales face a record £18.6 billion backlog of carriageway repairs - twelve years of work. Only about half the local network is in good structural condition. More than 32,500 miles have less than five years of life left. Roads are resurfaced, on average, once every 97 years. 1 million potholes. Road drains left without regular cleaning. We pay record fuel prices to drive on roads that wreck tyres and suspension. Water is no better. Pipes leak, rivers take the sewage bills still rise. No major new reservoirs were built in England for over 30 years. Dozens sold off. And we end up getting told that we have a hosepipe ban when there’s a few days sunshine in July. Schools, hospitals and rail carry the same pattern: maintenance deferred, promises announced, yet more decay. But meanwhile data centres, solar panels and wind turbines are being plastered across prime farmland reducing our food supply, natural habitats and resources. And the people in charge? An MP’s basic salary is £98,599 - up 5% this year, more than 20% since the £81,932 they were on in 2021. Ministers take a second salary and huge expenses on top. Their pay is increased while our taxes continue rise - which helps to fund them to manage our decline. What is overdue is a massive, sustained cost-of-living protest - visible, peaceful, organised, impossible to shrug off by the government - until tax rises, food, fuel and energy prices and sense general decay stop crushing ordinary households and until the country we pay more and more for stops being left to rot by local and national governments.

He drops a whole heap of inconvenient truths on AI data centres. Worth watching.