They seem to be losing the argument before it has even begun. At least five years before any decision is due to be taken on road pricing, the Government has been put on the back foot by a mass public protest on its own website.

Ministers complain that an e-mail urging people to sign the petition against road pricing on the No 10 website contains “myths” about tracking motorists wherever they drive, and about using the system to catch people speeding. If it were all true, I would sign the petition myself, said the Transport Secretary, Douglas Alexander.

It is ministers’ fault, clinging as they do to the “not ruling anything in or out” defence, that the myths are able to take hold. Many people believe, for instance, that the Government ultimately wants a universal national system that would charge drivers wherever and whenever they go.

In rural areas in particular, this has got people really worried. Add a few newspaper headlines giving warning of charges of up to £1.50 a mile, and the mother who has to drive her children five miles to and from school each day down empty country lanes is totting up £30 a day for the privilege.

Even a far lower charge — 10p a mile, say — would have a severe effect on people in rural areas. It would have cost me 40p more to buy the newspapers this morning, for instance; £2 to take my daughter to and from playgroup yesterday; 20p to meet someone down the road to talk about a garden in the afternoon; another £1.60 for the supermarket trip; 40p to the post office; and £1 to the rail station. That’s well over £5 in two fairly quiet days; £900 a year.

Imagine that was £1 a mile, which is what some of my neighbours believe the charge will be, and multiply everything by ten: £5 to the newsagent or GP, £20 a day to and from primary school twice, £16 to the supermarket and back, or £30 a trip to the local hospital. And all on roads where the stickiest congestion is a tractor huffing up a hill.

Ridiculous, huh? But no minister has done anything to dampen speculation. Nobody has ruled out applying road pricing to rural areas with no public transport or congestion. They have left the road clear for the Daily Mail — “£1.50-A-MILE ROAD TOLL” – and scaremongering drivers’ lobbies to send people scurrying to sign the petition.

Congestion charging at peak times on busy roads is an inevitability. It already happens on the railways, with higher fares at commuter times. Were I a commuter feeling that I had no choice but to drive to work along a jammed motorway or A-road, then paying £10 or £20 more for the privilege would make me furious. But it might also encourage me to share my car with other commuters, or to get on the train (good luck, there are no seats).

What the Government has done, though, is turn a limited pilot in a few cities — which will be expanded in perhaps a decade’s time to incorporate busy main roads at peak periods — into a national panic. In the report for the Government last year where he proposed road pricing, Sir Rod Eddington talked of moving towards a “widespread congestion- targeted” scheme, not a universal system.

It appears not to have occurred to ministers “ruling nothing in or out” that people could reasonably expect reassurance on this. Labour is an overwhelmingly metropolitan party, its ministers are driven around in official cars and MPs get their transport costs to and from work paid by the taxpayer. The rest of the country doesn’t.

Clever government advisers who never leave London admit to being in thrall to the success of the capital’s congestion charge. Innovative, brave, progressive . . . the superlatives fly. But London has fewer cars per head than anywhere else in the country: 345 per 1,000 population, compared with 473 for Great Britain as a whole. In the West Midlands, East of England, South East and South West it is more than 500. People outside London are far more dependent on their cars. You cannot extrapolate from a West London congestion charge to a universal one. Even in the Outer London areas to where it is being extended, it is facing far greater resistance than it did in the city centre: less public transport, you see, and not such bad congestion.

Sir Rod estimated that it would cost the UK some “£22 billion worth of wasted time from rising congestion” if Britain did nothing about traffic levels. In the Daily Mirror on Monday, Mr Alexander broke this down for you and me: “Sir Rod Eddington’s comprehensive report estimates if we do nothing congestion will cost Britain £22 billion in lost time by 2025 — more than £900 for every household. At the same time Sir Rod reckons if we get road pricing right in the future it would bring benefits of £28 billion, almost £1,150 for every household.”

The argument is complete fallacy. The £22 billion is an estimated cost to business and to people commuting by road. Sir Rod is an economist; he is not talking about the wasted time of a mother driving her kids to school, of a pensioner getting the bus to the shops. You cannot divide that £22 billion by Britain’s 24 million households and claim that congestion will cost each household £900.

Now look at where the supposed benefit of cutting congestion will spread, according to Mr Alexander: the £28 billion, too, is to be divided between all of us; £1,150 a household. Amazing! And there was I thinking that businesses paid additional profits to directors, shareholders and the Treasury, not divvied them up around the towns and villages. It is a fatuous and dishonest argument that deserves to meet, well, a fatuous and dishonest petition.

At this rate, a decent debate isn’t even going to get going, let alone the traffic.

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