We are seeing lots of stuff blaming travellers for fucking up the environment right now so here is a question for Gordon Brown, Call me Dave and Richard Branson.

How come when the train is so much greener than the plane, you can book cheap domestic flights to places like Scotland months before you can even book a standard insanely expensive rail ticket?

If you want people off aircraft then make rail tickets easy to understand and have the cheap deals available at the same time that the budget airlines do. Otherwise people who might prefer to take the train (as I would) end up flying because they need to forward plan their time, having things like jobs and stuff.

The fare structure on trains is obscenely complex, how can standard tickets from London to Liverpool cost between £12.50 and £101,and how come its often cheaper to buy two singles than a return?

So I contend its not us the travellers who are guilty of screwing the environment but the anti-competative practice of the railway companies.

Come on rail operators stop making life hard for the poor traveller, make intercity tickets one simple price, bookable six months in advance (instead of the present arbitrary 12 weeks for some journeys six for another) and you will get people off planes.

Come on Gordon stop wringing your hands and do something positive here, make the railways compete with the Airlines on the same conditions rather than just bunging an easy tax win on air passengers (oh they are so evil)disguised as envirnomentalism, every budget.

If the answer is "Well we don't want to interfear with the way private busines runs its affairs" No but it never stops the government from mugging private individuals to pay for things like illegal wars does it.

Oh and Dave are you stil cycling to work being followed by your official motor or have you given up that daft publicity stunt?