If you drive to work in a Fiat, Ford, Toyota or a Nissan the chances are you could have bought your car for three thousand pounds less in Europe - and if you travel by train you could travel twice the distance on a train in France.

But it's not always the big things that tick me off, it's all the little things - that feeling that I'm being ripped off at every turn. If I buy a music track from UK iTunes I pay about 20% more than I do from iTunes in France or Germany (why?) and 40% more than I would if I paid in dollars - and the same CD that costs me nine pounds in France costs me fourteen in Britain.

iTunes have just added movies on demand to the UK store just compare the price of a TV show in the USA $1.99(equivalent to £1.02 in the UK) but… in the UK we pay £1.89 a staggering 89 pence more. The same is true of the new movie rentals. Take for example National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets…Prices as follows;- 

                USA          UK                 Cost Differential  
    
To rent      $3.99       £3.49              £1.45  or 42% more expensive

To buy      $14.99      £10.99            £3.33 or  30% more expensive

What a rip off!!
     

Don't get me started on fuel prices, cigarettes and booze.

But what really annoys me is the way that businesses and politicians try to stop me deciding how and where to spend my hard-earned cash - in a world where I should be able to choose. And why can't I play DVDs that I bought in America? (And have you noticed how if you buy pretty much anything from the US they hit you with a massive import tax before it gets to you?).

We've been told that privatisation is good for the consumer - not if we don't really have a choice it isn't (it didn't do much for my water bills). The government pretends to be the consumer's friend - setting up endless OF-CONs but all these organisations do is sit by while we pay them to watch us getting short-changed.