Every single political party in this country is now unequivocally committed to taxing us for having the temerity to travel by car or aeroplane and for other heinous sins that I shall come to presently. That is the effect of Shadow Chancellor George Osborne saying that all the tax cuts proposed last week by John Redwood would have to be paid for by green imposts.

Labour will tax you because that is what it does naturally. The Nationalists will do it because they are distinguishable from Labourites only by the thistles, leeks or shamrocks growing out of their ears.

The Liberal Democrats will tax you because their beards, sandals and rucksack faction think that if only everybody lived as they do the world would be perfect. And now the Tories will tax you into immobility because they are paralysed by the fear of Labour depicting them as the party that would slash and burn public services.

Fancy, the Tory party denying you net tax reductions when a friend, Dan Lewis, of the Economic Research Council, has just reported that the quangocracy in Britain today runs off with £167.5bn – repeat billion – a year of your money. The nation is positively rattling with quangos – or, more accurately, Labour Party supporters' benefit funds. Gordon Brown has created seven in his first 53 days as Prime Minister.

Yet we would not be the slightest worse served if the Tories axed half of them, with a conservative saving of, say, £50bn a year – 12 times, incidentally, the amount currently raised by inheritance tax.

Take, for example, Sir Jonathon Porritt's Sustainable Development Commission. For its advice to the Government we pay £3m a year, even though engineers have demonstrated that in the field of sustainable energy it hasn't a clue what it is talking about.

Against this background, it is one thing for the Conservatives to be terrified of promising real tax cuts. But it is entirely another matter for them to be determined to offset any they eventually summon up the courage to reduce by introducing or raising taxes on the use of energy with the intention of preventing the globe from overheating.

It is not as if our use of energy were not already taxed to the hilt. Tax already represents the vast bulk of the inflated price of petrol and diesel. Inevitably, Ken Livingstone is leading in London the politically correct mission to penalise large cars, otherwise known as gas guzzlers.

In his last budget Gordon Brown doubled the air passenger duty and is now considering imposing another £27 duty on a return flight – or £108 for a family of four.

With those abominations – home improvement packs – the Government is seeking to penalise householders for what are considered to be energy inefficient properties. Have no doubt, they will think up ways of robbing you for any insulation deficiency (as distinct from your actual consumption of energy) through the property revaluation process.

You are already paying £20 a year on your power bills for useless wind farms. And before you know where you are, if the global warming police have their way, you will be told what you can and cannot do from cradle to grave in the interests of saving the planet. Dammit, Bath is already stacking bodies overnight at a crematorium in the interests of energy efficiency.

And for what? Nothing that Britain does or can do will make the slightest difference to the average temperature across the globe, always assuming homo sapiens is responsible for its warming.

Whatever your brainwashed impression, the jury is very much out on that notion. Indeed, we are now told there has been no warming since 1998, which turns out not to have been the hottest year on record. In America, at least, it was 1934 and the 1930s the hottest decade.

"O what can ail thee, knight at arms, alone and palely loitering?" Answer: Alas, the Tories have joined an all-party coalition pledged to waste our money to no purpose. Hope lies abandoned.