Bryan Forbes sees in the persecution of drivers a terrible metaphor for England’s decline: ministers hide in limousines while the police waste their time on minor road offences
Do others like me wake every day angry that we are unwilling members of a persecuted majority? At the risk of becoming a serial whiner, it seems to me that the unholy trinity of the Treasury, local authorities and the police forces are intent on intimidating and fleecing anybody who has the effrontery to own and drive a car. So vindictive and petty are some of the laws framed specifically against motorists that I am resigned to the fact that any time now the Ministry of Transport will be renamed the Ministry of Fear.
I learned to drive during army service in 1943, passing my test on a Bedford three-ton truck with a beast of a clutch, and have been driving a variety of cars, large and small, ever since with, happily, a totally clean licence. So why am I now so fearful whenever I get behind a steering wheel? My present car is eight years old and I have just renewed the licence for £220 (bumped up another fiver from last year). Today I learned that next year a car of this vintage will be taxed at £440 — yet another piece of duplicity from the Treasury, who hid this new stealth tax in the fine print of the last Finance Act. Thus when I and many others wish to exchange our old but roadworthy cars for new models we will be made victims of negative equity, the cars worth less than the tax disc.
I recall swooning many years ago when we woke to the realisation that the price of a gallon of petrol had risen to £1, even though in that distant time there was somebody on the forecourt to insert the nozzle and wash our windscreens with a smile. Now we do all the work ourselves and are fleeced for £1.18.9 a litre of petrol (even more for diesel) but, unlike the French, are too craven to take to the barricades in protest. Since 95 per cent of everything we buy in the supermarkets is transported by road, it does not need a Senior Wrangler to work out that any increase in the price of petrol and diesel is inevitably passed on in the cost of food and other essentials. If the exorbitant tax and VAT were slashed, household food bills could be dramatically reduced overnight. But will dear listening Gordon grasp that nettle?
Motorists have been relentlessly brainwashed by the eco-lobby to believe that they are major contributors to global warming, yet since China and India are never likely to change their polluting ways, legislating a few hundred 4x4s off the King’s Road, Chelsea, sadly ain’t going to save a single polar bear. Taken to its logical conclusion, cars should be banned, like cigarettes, in public places, but of course that would mean the Treasury maw would be deprived of the enormous revenues and unable to pay for the 2012 Olympics overspend, although 3,500 VIP limousines have been given the green light to sashay down to the East End on a special prole-free highway exactly as the Cold War Kremlin hierarchy used to travel in Moscow.
For the average citizen, public transport is so chancy and expensive that, even with petrol costing £5 a gallon, it is still cheaper for many of us to take to the roads rather than the often unreliable, sometimes unspeakably filthy trains, especially since, despite holding a valid and costly season ticket and being unable to find a seat, you can be fined for daring to stand in a first-class corridor. If congestion is bad above ground, try taking the London Underground where, if animals were transported in the same way, there would be a national outcry. The rush-hour scenes remind one of the railway exodus of the displaced population at the time of the partition of India.
After a decade of putting up with Gordon Brown being overpleased with himself, it is legitimate to ask whether he has ever experienced even a twinge of self-doubt. So fond of telling the rest of us how we should conduct our lives, his grasp of the problems of everyday existence seem to me to be minimal at best. As he undertakes his long and arduous journeys between Number 10 and the Houses of Parliament, is our Prime Minister troubled by the carbon footprints his bevy of motorised escorts leave behind? When did he last endure London’s traffic gridlock on his way to catch a VIP flight at Heathrow in an armour-plated Jaguar, travelling through the emission zone while a few yards away 747 after 747, oblivious to the zone’s existence, climbs into the sky every few minutes? Smugly enjoying their overprivileged status, the inhabitants of Village Whitehall now invite comparison with the worst excesses of the Sun King’s court at Versailles. How many members of the Cabinet do a weekly shop for groceries and then stagger home on a bendy bus with a heavy clutch of soon-to-be-illegal plastic bags? Which of them personally fill the petrol tanks of their official cars and worry about the amount of taxpayers’ money they are clocking up? Do they really believe that inflation is only 2.5 per cent when the council tax bill drops through the letter box of their second, all-expenses-paid-for home?
Waking up everyday in an England I often scarcely recognise, I have become accustomed to the daily massaging of truth and the vendetta conducted against the motorist which has now reached absurd heights. Eleven years of Labour have not solved our growing gun and knife culture, nor child poverty, to which it is so closely linked, but neither seem to be tackled with the same relentless evangelist fervour as the hounding of the motorist. The real ills of society remain to be defeated despite the millions of pounds flung at quangos, committees, judicial inquiries, jobs for the boys etc., a goodly proportion of them financed by the aforesaid poor bloody motorist.
We remain mute while CCTV and police enforcement cameras infiltrate every corner of this island, making us the most spied-upon society outside North Korea. The police, virtually emasculated by layers of bureaucracy, are seldom in evidence when we need them most but, miraculously, can be produced in large numbers to protect Chinese thugs during the progress of the Olympic torch through London’s streets. They should not exist just to trap and fine everybody on four wheels but to be highly visible every day and ensure that the ordinary citizen can go about his legitimate business and sleep soundly at night.
It is but a modest request and I hope that the new Mayor of London will unravel some of the idiocies of Livingstone’s fiefdom and inject some much-needed common sense into the governance of our principal city, to be emulated throughout the land.