THERE'S nothing in life so certain as death, taxes, and that any unpopular fiscal event will be referred to as a tax, even when it's not one.

The workplace parking levy (WPL) has very swiftly metamorphosed into the "SNP car park tax", joining other such misnomers as road tax, bedroom tax and dementia tax.

Tax is a dirty word, and a carelessly easy way to dismiss a policy your party doesn't like is to incorporate that word into a snappy name for a pseudo-tax.

A workplace parking levy sounds like little more than a dreary fee. Car park tax - now, those three sharp shocking syllables will get your blood pressure spiking.

There's another idiomatic certainty - that any degree of threat will be framed as a war. Poor motorists, embroiled in a war not of their making, victims of a combat they chose not to fight.

There isn't really a war on motorists but you can see why car owners feel beleaguered. Like smokers, they are easy to diminish and difficult to defend.

Like working class families clinging on in a "good school" catchment area, attempts can be made to price them out without so much as a guilty second thought.

The motorist is a bottomless money pit. If you can afford to drive, you can afford to pay all manner of surcharges and fees and additional penalties. If you can't afford to pay those extras then sack the car and use public transport.

It is politically acceptable on the left to heap financial woe on car owners. I'm loathe to use "driver" and "cyclist" because they're reductive words that serve a dehumanising narrative where we fail, particularly on the roads, to see one another as people and use the correct care and empathy.

It then becomes the job of the right to stand up for the put upon motorist who merely wants to beetle about in his 4x4 in peace.

Wait, here's another of life's certainties. Anyone with a job is "hard working" when a politician needs to make a point. This is going to penalise "hard working Scots".

What if you're not hard working? What if you're a lazy lump who spends the day refreshing the sports pages?

Do we ask for annual appraisal forms and work out the car park tax based on employee performance?

Car park tax, hard working Scots and the war on motorists have been pinballed around this past week as the Scottish Conservatives line up their guns in a salvo against yet another monetary blow for innocent folk with vehicles.

The WPL legislation comes in to force on March 4 and, ahead of the Scottish council elections, the Tories are positioning themselves as the only party willing to do the right thing and scrap this so-called tax.

The Glasgow Conservatives have come out strongly against the charge with a pledge in their budget to scrap it.

Yesterday Glasgow City Council passed a budget that will see parking charges increase in the city. Parking fees and permits across the city are going to be raised, generating an additional £3.4 million for the city. From January next year resident parking permits will be charged based on vehicle emissions, rather in the same way as vehicle excise duty (which you may know as road tax), and not per parking space.

That's quite a nifty idea and perhaps will make people think twice about the type of vehicle they own in a way that a wholesale increase would not.

I expect the backlash to these increases is going to come swift and fast from people who are furious about being made to park outside their own homes, as the complaint usually runs. That's always an interesting take - at what point did people start to believe they had the right to a specific bit of public road?

A tremulous story this week posits that students might have to pay £500 a year extra for parking spaces at Glasgow and Edinburgh's universities.

The National Union of Students in Scotland expressed concern about this, with its president saying, "We need to reduce car usage by building an affordable, reliable and accessible public transport network that is free for all students to access — not by forcing students to pay for the privilege of accessing their education."

Yes, absolutely, but it goes without saying that money has to come from somewhere. We also need greener, more sustainable, better quality public transport, the bonuses of which range from increased employment prospects to improved physical and mental health, environmental benefits and enhanced social opportunities.

So it makes solid good sense to take money from car drivers - whose marriage to convenience causes environmental harm - to invest into improving transport infrastructure, which is what the WPL will do.

In the case of Glasgow, it might all be a fuss about nothing anyway. Susan Aitken, the leader of Glasgow City Council, sounded ambivalent when she spoke on Times Radio this week about the possibility of introducing WPL in Glasgow. The scheme is devolved to local authorities to implement and Ms Aitken said, with regards policies to encourage people out of cars, that the levy is "probably fairly marginal".

More modelling is needed, she said, before it was introduced.

Those of us who live in cities with rich transport links like to make the argument that no one "needs" to drive. I stand by that to quite an extreme degree but not without sympathy for those who feel pressure to drive.

There are times in the office where having the car would be hugely more convenient to me for the fulfilling of caring responsibilities.

But "need"? Need and convenience are two different things.

People commuting in rural areas have a far different experience, however. Those with disabilities who are poorly served by public transport have a different experience. There are rare times when yes, people really do need cars.

While we have to be mindful of the needs of everyone, there needs to be robust reasons to halt projects that will help force a necessary change to how we travel.

Lazy arguments about wars on motorists, punitive taxes and appeals to "hard working Scots" are not that.