The men and women of the British car industry are deeply concerned that punitive government motoring taxes will cost their jobs, Autocar has learned.

In a set of frank interviews given exclusively to the world’s oldest and most respected car magazine, employees of Ford, General Motors, Bentley, Land Rover and Jaguar today make public their worries about the future of UK car-making, and the security of their jobs.

“I feel the government’s policies are clearly anti-car,” said Craig Caves, line manager at Ford of Britain’s Dagenham Diesel Centre. “On a daily basis they are producing an anti-car mentality that can only threaten jobs in the car industry. And it’s not just us at risk; it’s all the people supplying us and the people local to the plant.”

And the picture is the same at Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port factory. “This is the centre of our community,” said Phil Allman, Plant Convenor for the Unite Union at  the Merseyside base. “It’s not the politicians who lose out when things get cracked down on; it’s the family man who loses his job, and then we get family breakdown and social problems.

‘They say people can work in Tescos,” he went on. “But not everyone wants to work in Tescos. There’s a real gap between the mindset of Westminster and the outlook of the ordinary working man.”

In his last budget, UK Chancellor Alastair Darling raised Vehicle Excise Duty by hundreds of pounds a year on some cars, as well as back-dating it. He also introduced a ‘showroom tax’, effectively adding four figures to the purchase price of some UK-built cars, and has admitted that the proceeds of these taxes will fund the ongoing development of the technology necessary to make national road funding a reality.

“Under the current government’s watch, UK fuel prices have risen to record highs,” said Autocar features editor Matt Saunders, “and both local road charging schemes and ‘green taxes’ have hit motorists all over the country.”

“We’re all being forced into buyer cheaper, more economical cars under the banner of environmentalism – and yet no home-owner has experienced the same pressure to buy a more efficient boiler, or locally grown produce.”

“What’s not-so-widely understood is that the UK motor industry specialises in luxury cars, 4x4s and sports cars, from the likes of Bentley, Land Rover, Jaguar, Aston Martin, and Lotus, that tend to produce more CO2. So these higher taxes are, in no small part, making life more difficult for the very brands we should be striving to protect.”