Yah, sitting at £1.129 here in England at the moment. Considering a gallon is around 4.5L over here you are looking at a £5.10 gallon, or $7.80 approx. It's expensive, but like has been said we have services that have to be funded somehow. If only they actually did it properly.

Car tax, fuel tax, VAT (which is paid on top of the fuel tax, so when fuel goes up, so does the amount of tax you pay), national insurance, income tax, council tax, import duty, not to mention a lot of stealth tax like the £15 surcharge they added onto criminal fines recently.

A lot of the tax involved in bringing stuff in from the US to here is always related to how pissed off the governments of the two countries are about each other. My father buys American cars and imports them into the country, he bought a 69' Buick Riviera and about 3 days before he imported it there was an argument over something stupid like bananas and a trade embargo was put in place that took all special priviledges away. Stuff like cars made before 1972 not being elligible for import tax, and only being subject to 5% VAT. As it was he paid 17.5% VAT and 10% import duty. To add insult to injury, the VAT is added at the end of the calculation, so to the total cost of the car including car purchase price, shipping fees, finders fees, even the import duty is subject to VAT. It's a bit of a pisstake.