I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF BEING TOLD WHAT I CAN'T DO WITH MY CAR

One of the things that attracted me to the north London mews into which we moved three years ago had nothing to do with the house itself. It was the parking regulations, or rather the lack of them. Our mews is a little cobbled private road, which means that the traffic zealots employed by the London Borough of Camden may not set foot in it. Occasionally I see them sucking their pens and staring wistfully down the mews from the public road, but they cannot lay a finger or a ticket on our little black Golf.

You might think the idea of a dozen or so Londoners squeezing their Volvos and Range Rovers into limited spaces would cause chaos, but the private system, developed over years and based on custom and courtesy, works magnificently. We cheerfully move our cars around to accommodate others, and get our guests to leave little notes – "Just visiting number three". Not only does the system work, but it spares us the grief of dealing with a Labour-controlled London borough.

We don't have to pay £90 a year to the licensed bandits in Camden town hall to park outside our own home, or answer impertinent questions from "Camden Parking Solutions" about our ethnic origin, or be reminded that our council tax bills are being squandered on translating parking permit application forms into Welsh and Bengali.

The great residents' parking racket, which has now expanded into virtually every little town in the country, is a perfect illustration of how the motorist is fleeced by the Government and local authorities. First, a "problem", lack of parking spaces, is identified. The "solution" is a permit system, initially set at a peppercorn rate, which soon becomes yet another gigantic exercise in social engineering and a lucrative stealth tax. Exactly the same procedure was adopted with speed cameras and related "traffic calming" measures. A few years ago, the Government started funding "pilot projects" for cameras at known accident spots. No one could complain at that: speeding is against the law, and it would save the lives of "our kids". But now, hey presto, we have a £200 million a year industry catching 1.5 million generally law-abiding motorists, while chief constables across the country wonder why the middle classes suddenly hate the police.

The current fuss about rises in the forecourt price of petrol is a sideshow against the central issue of how successive governments have identified the motorist as the single greatest cash cow for the welfare state. The daylight robbery is wrapped up in vaguely "green" rhetoric: cars cause pollution and accidents, the Government wants to reduce emissions to meet some ill-defined global targets, and never mind that the motorists of Britain are being persecuted even as the government of China, as a matter of policy, is actually encouraging its population to become car owners. Occasionally, the scale of the Government's looting is laid so bare that even Gordon Brown begins to appear rattled.

The Times recently devoted much of it's front page to a report that the Chancellor was moving to save the motorist from petrol at £1 a litre by "hitting the phones" to ministers of oil producing states, pleading with them to agree to raise production at the Opec meeting in Beirut. Purnomo Yusgiantoro, the Indonesian president of Opec, was only one important figure in the international oil world to be contacted by Mr Brown, underscoring the Chancellor's determination, aides said, "to leave nothing to chance".

This is a lovely image, Mr Brown sitting in the Treasury, feverishly punching his phone, saving the motorist from the consequences of Middle East instability. Is it too suspicious to see in Mr Brown's stagey public activity an implicit suggestion that the Chancellor must act to save the British motorist from the unfortunate results of the Prime Minister's adventure in Iraq?

But in reality, the Chancellor has much more control over the cost of petrol on British forecourts than any of the Opec ministers he spoke to yesterday. Back in 1990, taxes and duty amounted to 60% of the price of a litre of unleaded; today the figure is 76%. In other words, the next time you spend £40 filling up your car, £30 is going straight to the Treasury, and just £10 to the garage, the refinery, the shippers, and the companies which find the oil and pump it out of the ground.

The overall figures of the Government's take from motorists are even more extraordinary. The AA has produced a cost analysis of Mondeo man, driving a 1.8LX model 10,000 miles a year. Including the £165 for the road fund licence, about £21 "premium tax" on his insurance policy, VAT on repairs, servicing, and tyres, and about £900 in duty on petrol, Mondeo man is paying just under £5,000 a year to run his car, £1,500 of which goes straight to the Government. This does not include residents' parking permits or fines for passing cameras at five miles over the speed limit.

It suits the Government to portray driving as essentially selfish, rather than a necessity to millions, because then motorists can be exploited for revenue purposes and generally treated with contempt. Witness two related stories in the Daily Telegraph. Drivers using the A483 in Wales have been held up for seven years by a temporary traffic light at roadworks that have not actually started. Meanwhile, the Driving Standards Agency has been forced to concede that the wait for a driving test in some parts of the country now exceeds 13 weeks. And to think that environmentalists talk with a straight face about the power of the over-mighty "car lobby".

The Government hates private car ownership for precisely the reason that millions of people will not give it up. A car gives us freedom and independence, it liberates us from the worst excesses of government incompetence, and spares us the indignity of lousy public transport. The Government responds by trying to curb us with speed bumps and cameras and parking restrictions, for it resents the freedom the car gives us, and brands us selfish. If you laugh when you hear ministers talk about "joined up" transport policies, or national walking strategies, and if you recoil at being called a "stakeholder" in New Labour's nightmare nanny state, you have a solemn duty: keep on driving. (Source: Telegraph)
 

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