RACHEL REEVES is heading down a dangerous road if fears of a fuel duty increase in this month’s Budget are to be believed. Don’t take my word for it — just listen to the views of the Chancellor’s constituents in her Leeds West backyard. In the town centre of Pudsey this week, I meet Ashley Smethurst, a new mother whose car has become a lifeline for midwife appointments or trips to visit family in the North East.
But if petrol prices surge, those journeys would become few and far between. At 32 — and made redundant just a week before starting maternity leave — Ashley worries she will be shut off from the vital family support she relies on. “It would just add stress and pressure if I felt I couldn’t get out and see people with my newborn”, she tells me as she cradles her baby.
Pudsey in West Yorks may be 200 miles from the House of Commons, where Ms Reeves will deliver her first Budget in less than a fortnight. But it is market towns like this that will bear the brunt of any decision to increase costs at the pump, with cash-starved public transport here making car travel absolutely essential for many. For 14 years its people have been among the millions of drivers to have benefitted from the Sun’s Keep It Down campaign to freeze fuel duty.
And the thought of THEIR MP putting an end to that is — in the words of one local — “diabolical”. Many tell me it would represent nothing less than a betrayal: for the working parents juggling school runs, the pens.
