The Sun’s campaign to help motorists with 5 clear promises is a way for the Conservatives to win the next election
THE SUN’S campaign to help the motorist with five clear promises is a way for the Conservatives to win the next election.
As of 2021 just over 50million full or provisional driving licences had been issued — enough for the vast majority of the population aged 17 or over.
Yet for years motorists have been given the fuzzy end of the lollipop by politicians.
Poor road conditions, potholes, delays, high taxation and a tiresome moralising that implied motoring is somehow wrong have been the lot of drivers for the past 25 years.
Yet the car is the harbinger of liberty.
It allows people freedom to move when they choose, not subject to timetables or state control.
For holiday, business or commuting, it opens up choice and takes power from officialdom to give back to the individual.
This ought to be popular, especially with Tories — but the bossiness of the green movement intervened.
The first attack was on road building — the argument against it was that the more roads you build, the more traffic there will be, so road building was reduced from 1997.
Bunged up by Khan
If people want to drive, we should build more roads to make it easier and quicker for them. This is not only liberating but economically beneficial.
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Road building has consistently been shown to boost growth as more journeys are taken and delivery networks become more productive.
Individual desire for open roads matches with the collective good of increased prosperity, but the Greens do not like it.
This has been made worse by Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. They are designed to boss about people who want to drive when the local council wants them to walk or use a bicycle.
This is not the business of councils who are there to serve residents, not order them about.
Poorly planned LTNs also make pollution worse because they can increase congestion on nearby roads.
But even before LTNs, councils have been doing all they can to slow traffic.
Roads are narrowed creating bottlenecks, the times for pedestrians to cross at traffic lights have been increased because apparently they are all too fat, and speed limits have been reduced.
Zones restricting traffic to 20mph have become a cash cow as motorists are fined on safe roads for doing low speeds.
Park Lane in central London has been deliberately bunged up by mayor Sadiq Khan and his war on the motorist, creating more of the fumes he supposedly dislikes.
Ultra-Low Emission Zones are similarly not designed for better air quality, but to stop the young and poor from driving.
Older cars are often bought by new drivers and the less well-off keep their cars for longer so the Ulez tax is pernicious. It hits diesel cars, which the government once encouraged people to buy. One of the scandals of recent years is the stitch-up by the German car manufacturers, the European Union and the Blair/Brown governments to encourage the use of polluting diesel cars.
The then-government joined in because it led to a reduction in CO2, even if it pumped out more genuine pollutants, in an aim to meet bogus green targets.
Now people are being punished for doing what the government once urged.
Perhaps this is a cautionary tale against rushing to buy an electric car.
The practices involved in making the batteries for these vehicles includes the use of child labour in poor countries.
Zealous enforcement
Meanwhile, the polluting effects of extracting some of the necessary metals are brushed over in the rush to ban the internal combustion engine.
These expensive and unreliable cars may get better, and it is sensible to keep options open, but if they are technologically good enough then the free market will see them succeed.
An arbitrary date or the setting of preliminary targets in 2024 ahead of the rest of the world just makes life more difficult in the UK.
This won’t affect the well-to-do. But what about the rest?
It is time for politicians to stand up for the motorist and stop harassing them. Nearly £26billion is already taken from drivers in fuel duty, and that is before the other taxes including £8billion in vehicle excise duty that fall upon the hard-pressed car owner.
These taxes are too high and although the state of the public finances makes them difficult to cut, they must not rise any further.
Tens of millions of voters are drivers. Any sensible political party would be strongly on their side and reduce the regulatory burdens on them by adopting The Sun’s proposals while sweeping away restrictions and zealous enforcement along with 20mph zones, except outside schools.
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The by-election result in Uxbridge shows the mind of the electorate.
It is a real opportunity for Rishi Sunak to be on the people’s side — he should let his inner Jaguar roar for the motorist.