Road charging campaigner Peter Roberts is far from gruntled over 10 Downing Streets' refusal to allow right of reply -- even though the road charging petition site promised that facility.
Following his famous anti-road pricing petition, which reached almost two million signatures, Roberts said that the petitioners "have been gagged and cheated by the 10 Downing Street spin machine."
PM Tony Blair responded to the huge, record-breaking petition in which said several times that his proposed road charging scheme would not constitute a stealth tax. Blair said that "congestion is a major problem to which there is no easy answer".
He didn't however comment on whether simpler measures, such as freeing up more motorway space by improved road behaviour policing, would be implemented before the road charging scheme, which has also raised fears of a Big Brother surveillance society.
Petitioners said they wanted to respond to Blair's email, which was sent to everyone who signed up. They said they regarded it as only reasonable to be allowed to email the entire list of petitioners, but 10 Downing Street refused.
The accusations include the cherry-picking of questions in a Webchat by roads minister Stephen Ladyman, and 10 Downing Street have also used various tricks to deny us the chance to debate.
Meanwhile, road safety campaign Safe Speed weighed in with accusations of "bully-boy tactics".
Founder Paul Smith said: "The Prime Minister's office at 10 Downing Street has resorted to extraordinary spin in an attempt to fragment and dissipate opposition to it's flawed road pricing policy.
"The following wording appears on the petition site: "We will use your email address to confirm your signature and, unless you ask us not to, we will also send you a maximum of two responses to the issues raised in the petition and a maximum of two emails from the creator of the petition."
"Peter Roberts has not been allowed to send emails to the petition signers.
"Instead of allowing Peter Roberts to make a clear statement to petitioners on the Downing Street Web site, they have attempted to bury Peter's response amongst others.
"Peter's response on the web site is three clicks down from the petition Web page, while the 'official' response is just one click down. Web publishers will know that 'clicking down' results in attrition rates of at least 10:1, so this move makes it (at the very least) 100 times more likely that Mr Blair's views will be read instead of Mr Roberts' by casual visitors.
"When you do view the page with Peter's response among others, Peter's is the only 'distant' photograph. We don't believe that this is an accident.
"No significant Downing Street publicity has been given to Peter's new Traveltax Web site -- see link below. And Peter Robert's response was limited to 300 words, but Blair's email was 1,274 words."
Roberts said: "I have been frankly shocked by the spin and catalogue of nasty little tricks. We were promised a debate, but as far as I can tell 10 Downing Street have used all the resources they could muster to dominate and stifle the debate.
"Downing Street aren't even allowing me to email the petitioners to thank them for their support. In their spin-driven world even common courtesy takes a back seat."
"I honestly believed that the e-petitions service was there to engage with the public, but they are just using it as a propaganda machine.
"They don't want to listen to us - they want to shut us up."
Roberts' response email is below:
Our road network struggles today with the demands placed upon it. This manifests itself as congestion when people travel to and from work. Outside these times, congestion is generally minimal and mainly found around badly designed junctions, roadworks, or where the free flow of traffic is compromised.
Our government proposes introducing a road pricing system to increase the cost of congested roads coinciding with your travel to and from work. This journey is not optional for most people and increasing the cost to work will have a minimal impact on congestion.
There are many alternatives to a complex and expensive road pricing system. Initially, our government must address the design of our roads with the ambition of increasing capacity and flow rates. Today, most road engineering appears designed to reduce capacity and reduce traffic flow. We see dual carriageways reduced to single lanes, traffic lights on free flowing roundabouts and bus stops pushed out into the road preventing cars passing when the bus is stationary.
Before we even consider this massive, complex and hugely expensive road pricing system, we should offer a comprehensive network of free school buses, staggered school opening times, decent park & ride schemes, tax breaks for people working from home and encourage commercial vehicle movements outside peak journey times.
Road pricing is an intrusive and highly expensive way of modifying transport choices. Its cost needs to be recovered before any benefit from taxation and adding additional bureaucracy to an already complex scheme is wasteful and unnecessary.
A simple form of distance pricing is to incorporate road tax into the cost of fuel. This removes the possibility of evasion and increases tax on inefficient vehicles. It's an effective, inexpensive and acceptable way of using price to affect travel choices.
Road charging campaigner Peter Roberts is far from gruntled over 10 Downing Streets' refusal to allow right of reply -- even though the road charging petition site promised that facility.