Conservatives should finally stand up for drivers
If Liz Truss reverses the toxic war on cars, the Tories would win over millions of disillusioned voters
MShe would be bucking the trend of successive governments which have treated motorists with nothing but contempt
y husband and I received a letter this week informing us that “Environ Civils” (eh?) would be carrying out “carriageway works” at the entrance to our road for five days starting a week on Monday.
Although the map provided by “Headway Traffic Management” (who?), based in Birmingham, was barely legible, we could just about make out that the 8am to 4pm closure was going to cause us maximum disruption during the first full week back after the summer holidays.
Why these works could not have been carried out during the past six weeks, when the roads have been much quieter, is anyone’s guess. Similarly baffling are the working hours: closing the road just as the school run starts, and reopening it just after it finishes. Parents greeted with the dreaded red “Road Ahead Closed” sign will be taken on a 10-mile diversion around already congested routes. And many will try to beat the traffic by following their sat navs down country lanes, which are almost all single track. It’s going to cause complete pandemonium.
Yet, as with most “carriageway works” these days, there was no advance consultation whatsoever with residents – or indeed that subspecies of taxpayer known as “drivers”.
Because the truth is that cars, and by extension their owners, are being discriminated against. Some policymakers seem to have caught on to the idea that cars are the ultimate vehicles of conservatism; confined spaces for our family and friendship groups that we can customise and move around at our will. They have liberalised our lives and our minds. As the American writer EB White observed, “Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.” Or as our own Lewis Carroll once put it: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
Any road, that is, except one in a low-traffic neighbourhood (LTN).
What might Alice have made of the wonderland that is 21st-century Chiswick? Once an easily navigable enclave of west London, it is now home to a £13million “green transport revolution” that has left residents fuming, emergency services frustrated and even the Queen stuck in gridlock as she tried to make her way from London to Windsor. Well, as long as the cyclists are happy, what does it matter that people can no longer easily get out and about?
LTNS are just one of a range of measures that have been imposed by largely Left-leaning councils who cannot abide the notion of anyone actually wanting to get anywhere in a hurry. Deploring the idea of people exercising their free will to get in a car and drive wherever they like, these councils appear to have teamed up with Whitehall to declare war on ordinary motorists.
Of course, it is fine for these socks-and-sandals-wearing bureaucrats to install costly traffic measures on a whim or perhaps to employ the latest wheeze of keeping roads closed “due to coronavirus” – clearly unaffected by it because they are all still working from home. But for the majority of us who use our cars to pay their wages, life behind the wheel has become a costly nightmare.
If the soaring price of petrol and diesel was not bad enough, we are now having to drive on smart motorways that could kill us and bear the burden of paying for congestion zones and “ultra-low emission zones” (Ulez) dreamt up by people who get chauffeur-driven to work. (Photographs have shown the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, the architect of so much misery for drivers in the capital, travelling around in a £300,000 five-litre armoured Range Rover while drivers face a £15 charge for entering central London – £27.50 if their car fails the Ulez test. Commuters, meanwhile, endure packed trains plagued by seemingly unending strike action.)
The aim is presumably to turn us all into public transport users, so we can pay through the nose for the privilege of being held hostage by trade unionists. But the trouble is that, outside major towns and cities, public transport is few and far between. If you live in a village like mine, you have to use your car because there are only five buses a day – mostly going in the wrong direction. I commute to work on the Metropolitan line, but I have to drive to the station, dropping the children at school en route. They take a bus home when they can, but more often than not they are embroiled in after-school sports activities which run later than the service operates.
So we are utterly reliant on the car. But even if we didn’t need to drive and just wanted to, what is wrong with exercising that personal choice? Funnily enough, not everyone wants to take to the roads in some Lycra-clad quest to save the planet. And, news flash: many cyclists have cars too, you know.
Liz Truss seems to see the problem more clearly than most of her colleagues. If she becomes prime minister next week, as predicted, she has promised to end central government funding for LTNS and hinted that she will scrap smart motorways. She has even suggested that she is willing to look at making motorway speed limits advisory, as is the case in Germany.
This sort of rhetoric should be music to Conservatives’ ears. For if the Tories cannot stand up for drivers, then what is the point of them?
She would be bucking the trend of successive governments which have treated drivers with nothing short of contempt. Despite bringing in more than £6.5billion in tax every year, and driving the cleanest cars in history, we motorists have been made to feel like environmental pariahs. Much has been made of the switch to electric vehicles (EVS), but why are we being penalised more now than they were 30 years ago when modern-day catalytic converters mean emissions are nothing like as polluting as they used to be?
In bringing forward the ban on new sales of petrol and diesel cars to 2030, the Government is basically ordering us to switch to EVS. Here, we ought not to forget what happened the last time motorists were told what to drive. We ended up in a “dash for diesel” that backfired spectacularly when it emerged that they produce less carbon dioxide (Co2) but more nitrogen oxides (NOX) than petrol cars.
Now diesels have been completely demonised even though the new Euro 6 standard for all cars made since 2014 means that a diesel still has considerably lower Co2 emissions than a petrol car, with NOX emissions limited to only around a third higher. In the meantime, no one seems to be talking about the carbon pollution caused by the production of EVS and their batteries – not to mention the energy required to charge them.
You would have thought that during a cost-of-living crisis, a government that wants people to purchase EVS might be minded to subsidise the cars. No, it has in fact withdrawn any of the financial help it used to offer people wanting to switch to EVS and hybrids. In June, the £1,500 plug-in car grant was axed citing “the success in the UK’S electric car revolution”.
One would question it being a success when research shows that, at the current growth rate, only a quarter of the expected total number of public charging stations will be realised by 2032. Moreover, the upfront costs of buying an electric car remain higher than those of petrol and diesel models – so again, even eco-friendly drivers end up being out of pocket.
Can it still be argued that it is cheaper running an EV, with energy bills set to rise by 80 per cent next month? And with the threat of blackouts looming, it is uncertain the National Grid will even be able to cope with everyone plugging in.
Which brings us back to the opportunity Liz Truss will soon have to change the gears and ditch this flawed war on drivers. No more LTNS, an end to the smart motorways madness and a proper review into speed limits. If she delivers, she and the Conservatives will win more public support than they could ever have imagined.