Rural residents are now getting stung by taxes for the vehicles we drive - Sarah Todd

It’s not a yummy mummy Chelsea tractor of gargantuan proportions. It’s a short wheel-based Mitsubishi Shogun with plenty of rust.

The age it is, it won’t be worth £4,000 - maybe not even £3,000 now given this scary amount of tax payable - but it’s a valuable workhorse for taking a few lambs to market or collecting this or that.

At only just over 5ft, it’s the ideal choice of 4x4 for this middle-aged writer/part-time farmer. Easy to manoeuvre with its compact design, but more than enough guts to pull a decent-sized load in the trailer.

As an aside, cars - as a rule - haven’t ever really been of much interest. However, there is a column that appears in Saturday’s Yorkshire Post Magazine in which people talk with fondness - or otherwise - about their first car. This My First Car series has become the first article turned to each week. It’s such a joy to read of people’s love for their first car.

It was an adored Fiat Panda 4x4 (with jute seats like deck chairs) for this driver’s teenage years and nothing - until this old Shogun - had ever managed to make my heart sing in the same way.

There is just something about it. The way it’s so capable, but yet handy enough to turn on a sixpence.

It’s a cracking car, with leather seats (good for dog hairs) and it just has that something that the old Fiat Panda had. A bit of personality.

The mileage it does over the course of a year is negligible. Because its fuel consumption isn’t great (and the radio doesn’t really work) for any long journeys The Husband’s car is borrowed.

Likewise for big supermarket shops as the short wheel-base doesn’t leave a huge amount of room in the boot and it is only three-door so stretching through onto the back seats with carrier bags of shopping is a bit of a pain.

The point that is trying to be made is that it’s not being driven the length and breadth of the country, polluting small children and killing wild flowers with its diesel fumes.

It’s a working vehicle that barely travels more than ten miles a couple of times a week at most.

It just seems Wrong - with a deliberate capital W - that because they are seen as the politically correct mode of transport, somebody in an electric vehicle who travels hundreds of miles up and down the country’s roads - and all the risks that involves to other road users along with wear and tear on the tarmac - pay nothing. Yes, diddly squat.

Never mind that they have, in some instances, paid the price of a small terraced house to buy the fancy new vehicle that keeps the Greta Thunberg’s of this world happy.

That money obviously isn’t an object. It just doesn’t seem fair. In fact, it seems like yet another kick in the teeth for country people. And rural communities already face challenges that are too often overlooked.

Surely it isn’t beyond the realms of reason to think there should be some sort of tax payable calculation that could be made, dividing the total amount of miles driven with any green credentials taken into account.

Fair enough, if this beloved old gas guzzler of mine was being driven by the gateway of a school twice a day and down the motorway every week.

Thinking about it, it’s not just country people who are getting the mucky end of the stick with current car taxation policy.

It is all those hard-working people in the middle who can’t afford brand new eco-friendly cars. Normal everyday people who have normal everyday cars.

Maybe too young to have a credit history to finance a fancy car, or working all hours to make ends meet with mortgages to pay and kids to bring up.

Or the retired, on a budget, who don’t drive far enough to warrant a big bucks green vehicle. HMRC has confirmed that pretty much everybody who doesn’t drive a new vehicle will be hit with car tax increases from April. Is that really fair?

Even to someone who confesses not to have much interest in cars, it just doesn’t seem fair.