We drivers need to fire up more than just engines
WHERE are your car keys? If you can answer that question, you are a driver and the subject of the largest piece of social engineering ever undertaken in the Free West.
Politicians, you see, hate those of us who drive. And with a disregard for the way we live so eye-popping only a disconnected élite could embrace it, they want to kick us to the kerb.
Riots that set Paris ablaze were in part about the hollow centrism of callow President Macron, but they were largely about tax on diesel.
Diesel is the mainstay of rural France, essential for agriculture and haulage – just as in Scotland. Yet here the SNP is committed to ‘leading the world’ (Warning: Shambles ahead!) by outlawing all new petrol and diesel engines by 2032.
Only a party fronted by someone such as Nicola Sturgeon, who cannot drive, could have come up with this wheeze when electric vehicles and their support infrastructure need billions of investment.
When you think the biggest hassle about driving is waiting while the taxpayer-funded chauffeur brings the taxpayer-funded car to the door, you are in Marie Antoinette ‘Let them drive Volvos’ territory.
When, like too many of our politicians, you have working hours so lax that you can commute by taxpayerfunded foldy-up bicycle and taxpayerfunded train season ticket, you are not some pious eco warrior but a cossetted technocrat.
In the real world, we pay a fortune for our cars, with tax on the purchase, fuel, insurance (That came as a shock, didn’t it Humza Yousaf, when a brush with the law forced you to stump up for cover), tyres, servicing, parking. Coming soon are congestion and emissions charges, 20mph limits... Yet most of us have no choice but to battle on over sclerotic and crumbling roads. Public transport is a bad joke if you live beyond the Central Belt and work outwith Monday to Friday, 9-5.
Motorists should be more vocal. Look at the fuss train passengers (rightly) kick up about woeful service, yet tiny numbers regularly use the trains.
By contrast motorists are a massive army sitting in silent rage on the St James Interchange, the Kingston Bridge, Castlecary Arches, the Admiralty (that Queensferry Crossing is going to be lovely when it’s finished) and a thousand other traffic blackspots. POLITICIANS tell you they are using ‘carrot and stick’ to wean us off polluting cars and onto ‘clean’ public transport. The stick is much in evidence – speed bumps, workplace parking charges. The carrot? Rotting in the ground because it’s too expensive to run a tractor to pick it up.
If the SNP wants a transport revolution, it needs more firepower than Michael Matheson can muster as Transport Minister and it needs to ‘front-load’ investment in public transport. Get the trains running properly so bosses don’t fear taking on employees who rely on ScotRail. Give us bus timetables fit for the 21st century.
Yellow vests don’t suit private motorists and no one likes a whiff of tear gas. Riots are, mercifully, not the British way. Yet the anti-car faction are tough on jobs, tough on the causes of jobs and are driving motorists into a very tight corner.