Who decided that all motorists were criminals?

Austin Barry

Brilliant. A perfect vignette of this increasingly Dystopian little island. One senses that some tipping point is on its way, but when and how and with what consequences remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the only position to adopt to avoid dangerously high blood-pressure seems to be one of ironic detachment, or perhaps an angry silence - for now.

David Short

They're even after the cyclists!

Yesterday at the junction of Fleet Street and Blackfriars on a rare long-haul cycling trip from Docklands (I seldom go further than Canary Wharf on a bike), I spotted at least ten police whose sole job it was to catch any cyclists who jumped red lights. They had a couple of cycle coppers waiting to give chase.

Obviously we are failing in our patriotic duty to pay over mountains of cash on vehicle duty, petrol duty, congestion charges and parking fines to fund lavish public sector pensions, and must be arrested forthwith!

cuffleyburgers

The plight of the unfortunate motorist is the fate of the free man writ small.

John of Enfield

...it's BILLIONS dear boy, not MILLIONS....(Thrown away that is).
Personally I am plotting to wreak havoc on the Olympic Zil Lanes in 2012. Yet another symbol of North Korea in our beloved country.
If I stay out of gaol that long.

Stephen Wright

Very well put Mr. Forbes.

Ten years ago I wouldn't have believed it possible that the country we live in could have changed so much for the worse.

Fortunately the electorate have at last seen the error of Blair/Gordon's governments, so now we simply wait until the next General Election when we will see the back of them for good.

kay stern

Absolutely spot on!! Also having visited both India and China recently, as well as the US regularly,where massive numbers of cars abound (with even more to come thanks to Tata) why on earth are British motorists the only ones being hounded like this? We are a tiny fraction of the world's motorists and our rocketing bills are directly linked to the price of fuel and the taxes being extorted.We lose in every way while corrupt,I'm alright jack Politicos and 'vips' swan along untroubled!!

David Short

If I'm still in Docklands when those absurd special Olympic lanes come in, I shall daily keep a few eggs about my person and throw them at the limos.

Surely Boris will not allow this? He's no fan of the self-aggrandizing of the IOC. Why on earth does a simple sports event allow this kind of Sovietisation of London.

Sometimes I think I'm dreaming when I come across the absurdities of this very stupid country we have become.

beachhutman

Come on, motorists are targeted because (a) owning a car is a toff thing to do, cabinet ministers have their own public transport, (2) screwing motorists has been established as the best way to meet police targets, and (iii) the police have been corrupted by labour, who regard police as an arm of the government, not an arm of the law.

dexey

I'm inclined to agree - I scarcely recognise England anymore; it is covered in cars parked illegally speeding recklessly and pumping out excessive noise and fumes.
We should be actively removing cars from the roads and improving public transport.

Anthony Taylor

You're lucky! I remember calling at my regular place for petrol and the guy said he could not fill me up because the pump's mechanics only allowed the price to go up to five shillings a gallon. Happy days

Michael

@David Short

Quite right too. I fail to see why a cyclist should be entitled to break the law by jumping red lights. It's a criminal offence. If you want to get through the lights you could get off and push it.

And before you start: yes, motorists are guilty of all sorts of infringements from carelessness up to criminality. But their bad behaviour does not excuse that of cyclists.

David Short

Michael, I was talking about the absurd waste of the time of at least ten police officers in a city which has stabbing and other violent crime rates that are higher than many major cities in the US.

I don't jump red lights at busy intersections. I value my life and mobility far too much. I see nothing wrong however in doing so at deserted junctions in, for instance, Canary Wharf on a Sunday.

There is revenue generation in stopping cyclists and fining them, whereas there is no money to be had in policing the streets against violent hoodlums.

Yes, a very stupid and venal country.

Dwight Vandryver

Don't worry - if New Labour wins another term, the evil eye of the state will be turned on the pedestrian. The carrying of ID cards at all times will be compulsory, and within each card a RFID tag will be secreted. Through the tag and with suitable roadside detectors, the location of the card, hence the carrier, would be known at any instant. Thus J-walking, stepping off the pavement, and running except at approved times, would be made into enforceable offences. Furthermore, the distance covered on foot would be calculated enabling a Pedestrian Tax to be imposed, ostensibly to be spent on the maintenance and upkeep of the pavements. In six or seven years from now, you may be looking back with nostalgia to 2008, much as we do now to those days prior to 1997.

jose carlos

Quite right. Taxes, threats to individual liberty and parental guidance by the government throughout your entire life are taking us all down to an Albanian regime.

Wilf

Roll on The Revolution.

floatingvoter

I am amazed that it has taken this long for such an article to appear. For years if any car user spoke about being taxed to death the greenies would be called round and you would be clobbered with cucumbers. As the article says what is the point in persecuting the car user when the whole of the UK only produces 2% of the worlds CO2. The way the car user is treated in London is one of the reasons we moved out of London. I was given a ticket for having 2 wheels on a pavement at 3am in the morning when I was parked opposite a police station that I had been called to to assess a mentally ill person in custody. I mean who goes out @ 3am in the morning to give out penalty tickets. Clearly someone had not met their quota.

THX1138

I thought the best reply to your rant was to quote directly from from one of your own Peter Hitchens on his Sunday Mail Blog.

Sorry it's long but well worth reading

In case you all thought I made it up

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/11/cars-on-the-lef.html

The Article was called

Cars on the Left, Trains on the Right

This post also slid away from the main point. One of the many reasons for my breach with the Tory Party is its serial contempt for public transport, and the assumption that a conservative person necessarily sympathises with the Jeremy Clarkson world view. This is largely for electoral advantage - a belief that people drive cars because they like it, and that every 'motorist' is not just a driver of a car, but an enthusiastic promoter of individual motor transport. Personally, I doubt this. Many people own and drive cars because they have to. Likewise home ownership is virtually compulsory if you want to live in pleasant circumstances, or to protect your savings against government-created inflation. The difference is that cars are a depreciating asset, yet people often have to borrow heavily to buy them, a well-known economic error. They are also quite heavily taxed.

And thus we got into an argument about the 'Road Fund ' licence - a name which it ceased to have in 1936. That's a very interesting piece of knowledge which I am glad to have acquired, and am grateful for. Perhaps all the pro-car chunterers, raging about why they paid for their 'Road Fund' Licences but didn't get more in return, will now revise what they said. There is no Road Fund. There is no Road Fund Licence either.

Patrick Hadley accused me of missing the point about cars and subsidy. He said "If the total raised from car-users, that is directly targeted on car use, such as petrol and car tax, is significantly greater than the amount spent on roads then that does provide strong evidence against the proposition that some roads are heavily subsidised by the taxpayer".

Well, several points. Firstly, all subsidies are subsidies, whose size is based on the government's view of the present need, not on where they got the money from, and have nothing to do with the origin of the money. You could raise £100 billion from cars, and spend none of it at all on the roads for several years (beyond unavoidable running repairs) if you needed to fight an urgent defensive war. In which case it would be true to say that the roads were not being subsidised. But would, or could ‘motorists’ then argue that 'their' money was being wrongly diverted? I think not.

If I never used a car at all, I would expect to help pay for the roads because a modern society needs roads. If I never flew, I'd expect to pay for air traffic control. The question is, how much does our society need them, and what sort of roads does it need, and how should they be balanced with other forms of ground transport. Likewise, I expect to pay for national defence, and I expect pacifists to pay for it, too since they could not be pacifists for long if someone wasn't prepared to defend their right to their batty views. There's a different sort of argument about taxation and subsidising state education.

Many people save hard and spend hard on school fees, yet also pay heavy taxes to pay for state schools they don't want to use. Others have no children. Yet all are expected to pay for a state school system. I say that is absolutely right, but that in return they should have a great deal more say about how that money should be spent, which is actually decided by a small, closed elite of 'education professionals' whose ideas about education are discredited and wrong. The same is true about transport. The transport policies of this country seem to have been agreed in private among civil servants and the road lobby some years ago, and, however reliably they continue to deliver congestion, planning blight and oil dependency, they remain unchallenged.

The parallel continues. Many people would rather not pay school fees, and only do so because the state schools are so bad where they live. Even the childless are affected by the ignorance and indiscipline of the products of bad state schools. The relation between the taxed subject and the taxing government, and the relationship between the way their money is raised and how it is spent, are the heart of politics, and far from simple. What is certain is that, the more we are taxed, the more we ought to think carefully about how our money should be spent.

Traines_228x214 Unless we are to go back to universal toll roads (and toll footpaths, come to that) we have to accept that national and local government subsidise transport. The question is, not how much money they raise from cars, but how the money should best be spent and on which form of transport. By the way, as a cyclist, I am often upbraided by drivers for having 'paid nothing for the roads'. Who says? I pay income tax and council tax, and VAT on almost everything, and duty on wine and beer. I contribute lavishly to the huge government bank account, which is then spent on many things including roads. It is absurd to imagine that there is any connection, direct or in direct, between money raised by taxing various forms of road transport, and the cost of roads. All taxation income ends up in the same pot, and gives the taxpayer a right to a general say in how the money is spent - a say that would be greater if we had better political parties, another reason for dumping the Useless Tories.

I'd also add that, if your policy directly encourages car ownership and use, plus the transfer of freight from road to rail ( and I don't think anyone would deny that the last 50 years of transport policy have done exactly that) you will increase the number of taxable vehicles, and increase the amount of taxable fuel consumed, while also decreasing the use of public transport (increasingly restricted, as in the USA, to those who cannot drive - children, the very poor, the old and infirm) who just happen to be the politically powerless. Only one group of rail travellers are politically powerful - middle-class commuters in the South East of England. Rail transport largely survives at all in this pro-car climate because, in dense metropolitan areas, even well-off adults have to travel by train to have any hope of getting to work on time. This is why they endure the overcrowding and delays and the absurd high fares. They know (though they rarely admit) that the car would be even worse. So, if, as Mr Hadley says, the car driver pays six pence a mile more to the government than is spent on roads, that is the result of so many people having been forced on to those roads by decades of biased pro-road, anti-rail, anti-bus, anti-tram, anti-bicycle and anti-pedestrian policies (and subsidies).

I would be interested, in any case, in the details of this calculation. Does it feature the cost of the annual massacre of road deaths and injuries, the devastated lives, the pensions and compensation paid to injured survivors or, prosecutions, costly medical treatment? Does it feature the rather advantageous tax arrangements for company cars? Does it feature the other indirect costs of mass car transport in debilitating back pain (one of the main causes of lost working days ) and the high incidence of non-hereditary heart disease and gross obesity associated with and resulting from mass use of car transport? Does it include a figure for the dependence of this country on the world's most despotic regimes for the only practicable fuel for these cars, and the military costs resulting from our need to defend our interests in these dangerous regions? Does it include a factor for the interest costs of the loans taken out to build the roads in the first place? Does it quantify the noise bought and grime spread over huge urban areas by the presence of arterial roads?

How does it measure the social cost to children of not being able to play safely outside or walk any distance? Where in these accounts do we find a true costing of the constant depreciation of the national road stock, its thousands of crumbling bridges and constantly repaired surfaces? Or of the £114,000 cost per unit (as recently revealed) of the light-controlled pedestrian crossings which are increasingly the only type that drivers obey, and not even always then?

A number of people confused the issue by concentrating on the argument that there are unpleasant people on trains. Well, there sometimes are, but, as in so many other areas, this problem has been allowed to grow partly because so many people - especially politicians -have been allowed to insulate themselves from reality. Nobody is keener than I on restoring order and civility to the public square. But as long as the powerful and the influential imagine that a private car is the only normal or desirable form of transport, this is unlikely. What they don't experience, they won't grieve over. You cannot expect the trains and buses to become quieter, safer or more orderly until politicians and opinion-makers travel on them regularly.

Why does the government have a fleet of several hundred chauffeured cars, for ministers nobody has ever heard of? If, as is stated, their red boxes are not safe on buses and trains, then the buses and trains need to be made safe. For if a red box isn't safe, and then people aren't safe. To provide these understrappers with cars is a bit like the action of the old Soviet Communist Party, when sewage from Yalta began to pollute the private beaches of the General Secretary's Crimea dacha. There were two possible solutions: one, build a new sewerage system for Yalta; two, build a nice new dacha further down the coast. Guess which they picked? It's the same with schools. If every pro-comprehensive politician was obliged to send his own children to a bog-standard urban comprehensive, we'd have grammar schools back in five

Martin

Well said...After 11 years of this shower I really am beginning to feel depressed.

Geoff Latham

Oh dear, yet another appropriation of pathetic victimhood by this country's ghastly right-whinge middle classes. What this boils down to, in short, is that - in the way that's depressingly becoming so customary - the middle classes feel they're far too important to be subject to a mere trifle like the law of the land - in this case laws relating to road use. In their view, these are for people who they regard as having lower social status, not for nice "important" people with "important" meetings to get to. And when tackled on this point, there's always the fall-back excuse - delivered in a weary tone and with a heavy sigh... "Well we're just trying to keep the economy going". And what's laughable to a cynical observer like me is that these people, as undoubted supporters of the free market, cry foul when a free market -in this case in oil products - operates to their disadvantage. And "Call-me-Dave" Camoron's assumption of the role of motorists' friend deserves more derision than it's receiving. I was going to post a longer post but, to my amazed discomfort, I have to agree to everything Peter Hitchens says in the article posted by THX1138. Oh, and lastly, all Spectator posters, please spare the inconsolable "this once-great nation" guff - I'm running out of tissues to dry my eyes...from laughter.