Memo to the green zealots: A car is NOT a luxury for many of us

FOR many Scots – especially in remote and rural areas – a car is not a luxury. It is a necessity: the lifeline of a household and the mainstay of small communities, many tens of miles from the amenities of towns. And the exhaust fumes are but lost in the cool upland breeze.

Without a car, you are at the mercy of ill-timetabled and infrequent buses. Collecting something as prosaic as a sack of potatoes becomes the stuff of Homeric epic. It is hard to reach the distant church or to deliver your children to a friend’s birthday party – and what if there is an accident at school, or other family emergency, and you need to be there very, very quickly?

But you might not have remembered that yesterday as the Government surprised us with its dramatic proposals to tackle the crisis of air pollution; not least, a ban on the sale of diesel and petrol cars by 2040. One wonders if the Government itself remembered.

The problem is diesel smut – or, scientifically, nitrogen dioxide. It is invisible, it is nasty – there is no safe level of exposure – it attacks our lung function and exacerbates allergies, heightens the risk of stroke and heart attack, before wafting off over Scandinavia to become acid rain and kill their trees. Asthmatics, children and the elderly are especially vulnerable and diesel cars are especially dirty.

Short-sighted

Unfortunately, thanks to shortsighted fuel duty decisions by the last Labour government, there are now many more diesel cars in Britain than there were two decades ago – more than 10 million. In 1997, there were just 3.2 million – and, since 2010, more have been annually sold than their petrol equivalents.

Doing nothing is not an option; the Government was already under strong legal pressure. The pollution is thought to cause 40,000 British deaths a year – 9,000 in London alone – and ministers believe it the largest environmental risk to public health in the UK, costing £2.7billion in lost productivity in one recent year.

The ban is just part of a wider package of measures in an ambitious £3billion programme to clean our national air – retrofitting buses and locomotives; reprogramming traffic lights; realigning junctions; altering roundabouts and speed-bumps; and, too, new initiatives to encourage cycling and walking.

The report underpinning all this – though green lobbyists, who hate motorists anyway, are already slating its leaked terms as ‘much weaker than hoped for’ – is so radical that it is little wonder its publication was consciously delayed till after the general election.

Owners of diesel cars – especially those recently bought – are understandably alarmed as to their resale value.

But the Government has conspicuously dodged the single and most effective way of addressing what, of its nature, is an urban problem – start charging vehicles for entering designated clean-air zones. London mayor Sadiq Khan is already introducing a daily £10 ‘toxic T-charge’ to be levied on up to 10,000 of the oldest and most polluting vehicles.

Tory administrations have always been loath to slap additional taxes on motorists. But what is proposed is a blunt instrument that will land just as heavily on those of us who live in the countryside – where air pollution is not an issue.

Studios yesterday were full of steeple-fingered, virtuesignalling types deploring suburbanites who clog our streets on the school run or trundle to the supermarket for Saturday’s big shop, belching out NO2 in blithe disregard for our skies.

But if you live in the Borders, the Highlands, the Hebrides – indeed, the mass of the Scottish landscape, outwith our big cities and the M8 corridor – a car is vital.

The day is past when most, for instance, in rural Lewis lived off the land and went to distant Stornoway a couple of times a year. Most of working age now have jobs in the town; even as recent decades have seen the disappearance of village shops and travelling grocery vans.

It is the same elsewhere. You may live wherever you like on Skye, but if you want a bank, a vet or a supermarket you must motor to Portree or Broadford.

There are many parts of Scotland where you must drive a long way even to avail yourself of a filling station – and, all over rural Scotland and in recent decades, many schools have closed and not a few little hospitals been shut down. Even having a baby, for thousands of young couples, means travelling to a maternity department a long way away. (A friend in Inveraray, in April, was delivered of her daughter in Paisley.)

Now, suddenly, we gaze at a future of electric vehicles: basically, whizzing everywhere by sewing machine, and the more daunting for those of us old enough to remember the brief and forlorn career of the Sinclair C5.

Electric cars are doubtless improving; and by 2040 may well be of extraordinarily high standard. At the moment, all but a few and very expensive models have two notorious drawbacks. They are of limited range – typically, a hundred miles on a single charge – and they are very slow to charge; typically half an hour, while you twiddle your thumbs impatiently.

Neutered

If you live in, say, Rodel in South Harris and need to take your cat to Stornoway to be neutered, that’s a round trip of 117 miles; and if you want to drive from Ullapool to Edinburgh, that is a journey of 210 miles, with at least one lengthy stop to replace the volts.

For most of us there are still very few places to plug in your electric vehicle, though the day may well come when we can do it at home.

Then there is the issue of agricultural machinery. Livestock and feeding stuffs are heavy; sheep do not tend to linger politely by the main road. We need tractors of serious welly to negotiate steep unmetalled country and it is difficult to picture Old MacDonald thundering up snowy glens by Toyota Prius to tend his shaggy Highlanders. That electric cars remain more expensive and less practical is just one problem. We simply do not have the electric infrastructure in Britain for the revolution proposed.

The Automobile Association has already warned that the National Grid is unlikely to cope with everyone charging up after the evening rushhour. Experts suggest Britain would have to build ten huge new power stations to cope with a 50 per cent increase in electricity demand – or import power from Europe, with all that entails for energy security and at a time when we want to be beholden as little as possible to Johnny Continent.

Despite our huge contribution to the Treasury, drivers have long been wearily used to being messed about by government. Indeed, much modern infuriation – speed bumps, speed cameras, cycle lanes and yet more traffic lights – not only costs the economy tens of millions in delayed journeys but has greatly increased pollution.

Now we are presented with Draconian schemes that will impose huge costs on consumers for averred environmental benefits that are far from certain – costs that will fall hardest on residents of rural Scotland, very many of them modestly waged.

The Government would do far better – and save a great deal of all our money – to consider such measures as clean air zone charges; a diesel scrappage scheme; and alternative technologies (for instance, improved engines that run on pure ethanol).

Instead, we have these illthought proposals of longterm and eye-watering costs. As Ronald Reagan cracked, indeed the most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’