So the British motorist is finally feeling beleaguered enough — the threat of the Big Brother approach to tracking every journey by every vehicle has been the tipping point — to sign the petition against road pricing on the Downing Street website. With the petition closing on Tuesday, almost 1.5 million people have added their names at the rate of one a second in recent days.

And one of the more amusing effects of democracy in action has been the comments of one unnamed minister, who said: “The person who came up with this idea [the Downing Street petition site] must be a prat.”

Still, once the petition has closed, every signatory will receive an e-mail explaining the Government’s position on road pricing. Not, of course, that we need to be told. It is, regardless of public opinion, pressing ahead and will introduce the bill in the Commons this spring. This will then allow trials to begin, with the favourite areas being Manchester and Birmingham.

But wait, the Government says, many drivers will save money through these pay-as-you-drive schemes because it will abolish vehicle excise duty (VED) and cut fuel duty. Fair enough. But a hypothetical study for the BBC by Professor Stephen Glaister, an expert in transport and infrastructure, into how much drivers might pay for the congestion they caused, found that a Birmingham commuter might end up paying about £1,500 a year for driving 19,000 miles.

Say he has a band D petrol car, which attracts an annual VED of £125, and averages 40mpg, with fuel duty at 51.5p a litre, the Government would have to abolish it entirely and even then he would be worse off. And with fuel duty adding £23.5 billion to the Treasury’s kitty every year, the chances of any large-scale reduction are slim in the extreme.

The British motorist hands over about £50 billion a year, of which about a quarter is ploughed back into the roads. Your guess is as good as mine as to where the rest goes.

If the Government wants to raise more revenue for public transport, it ought to do something about the estimated two million untaxed and uninsured cars on the roads. These drivers are the ones who drive past speed and congestion-charge cameras with impunity and are increasingly involved in accidents that, leaving aside the personal devastation caused, load the premiums for the average motorist.

So are we right to gather up cudgels and e-march on Downing Street? I don’t think we should bother. After all, there are about 33 million vehicles registered for use on UK roads and given the Government’s track record in requisitioning new computer systems — tax credits, the Child Support Agency, the Ministry of Defence — Big Brother seems to have difficulty locating its own backside, let alone you and your car.