'Taxing motorists even more is a terrible idea. Is it any wonder local high streets are dying,' asks Lady Judith McAlpine

This inability to do simple maths seems to have afflicted all governments since Mrs Thatcher was ousted.

None brave enough to say: "We can't afford to pay you not to work" or "we cannot support you."

So, how is Sir Kier going to find money to dish out to the undeserving?

He is going to tax even more those who actually work and pay tax and buy stuff on which they pay tax and help to keep the country running.

His first "awfully good idea" is to charge the tax-paying motorist yet more for his journey to work.

If you live and work in a town or city, you don't, theoretically, need a car: several London-dwelling friends hire a car if they want to visit "the country".

However, if you don't have easily accessible public transport and need to get to work: you need a car.

You pay tax on your purchase, road tax, tax each time you buy fuel: which surely is a mileage tax? Now you are to be asked to pay each time you leave for work: and the further away from work you live: the more you will pay?

I assume Sir Kier and his friend, Sadiq Khan, share a common hatred of the combustion engine. Do they want everyone who can't access public transport to work permanently from home? Have either of them done anyjoined-up thinking?

I can't understand how such a tax might be levied but presumably yet more will be spent on monitoring the car's mileage without the owner being able to doctor it. Cue some young whizz kid who comes up with something to do said doctoring.

What about the "school run"? When mine were tiny a group of us took it in turns to ferry six or more kids to pre-prep.

This was before seatbelts. I could fit eight of them in a stripped-out Porsche!

If this nonsense goes ahead of course, today's parents might car-share but wouldn't be able to fit more than four in - if that, because of car seat rules.

Loads of others will be left wondering what happened to the "school bus" or wishing they hadn't moved beyond walking distance of a school. Will house prices near schools rocket?

As for "shopping": the supermarkets who deliver may see a vast increase in customers ordering online and the few remaining high street shops will see an even greater decline in people prepared to get in a car to go "shopping".

Once a daily ritual for so many; now an occasional outing for the family, perhaps on Sunday when car parking charges may be lower?

No one goes to church any more so "let's go shopping?"

Only I doubt most of those trips will be to local high streets: most will be to out-of-town shopping centres where they won't even be charged to park. How can the "High Street" compete?

This week I drove through several pretty Cotswold towns, heaving with bank holiday visitors, every shop and cafe bustling. I was grinning with the imagined pleasure of the shopkeepers and cafe owners.

Then of course I spent hours wondering why there is this strange phenomenon when my local town's high street is dying like so many of the other small towns I drove through.

Shops clumsily turned into homes, looking embarrassed to still look like shops, blank windows or "closing down" or "to let" signs making the adjacent shops struggle to look inviting.

Next up is the other anomaly my journey threw up; hundreds of new "homes" in the middle of fields with no sign of shops, schools or doctors' surgeries.. no car? No life.