THE WAR ON THE MOTORIST is becoming ever-more absurd. The situation with Sadiq Khan and ULEZ in London is getting the bulk of the media attention, but there are similar daft concepts being imposed by councils up and down the country.
Here in Wales, Mark Drakeford’s government is making 20mph the default speed limit on restricted roads from September.
Drakeford’s government never misses an opportunity to nanny and fuss in our lives. Throughout the pandemic, restrictions were lifted later and more cautiously than in England, and there was a growing sense among the Welsh public that he was being ‘different for the sake of being different’.
Yes, that actually happened! You were free to fill your supermarket trolley up with as much booze as you wished, but you were not permitted to replace your broken kettle or buy a toy to keep your child occupied during long, boring days at home when they could not go to school or mix with their friends.
The theory behind it was that local hardware stores were not permitted to open, therefore to make it a ‘level playing field’ supermarkets would not be permitted to sell such items, but the absurdity of it was clear to see.
Few members of the Welsh Government have had any meaningful experience of the private sector. Starting businesses, running businesses and an entrepreneurial attitude to life are not on their radar. Cabinet positions are dominated by people whose previous professional experience was in social services, the trade union movement, the teaching profession, the charity sector and in Welsh political journalism. Private enterprise is a world they neither know nor understand.
All these measures on making car use prohibitively expensive is, in theory, being done in the name of ‘saving the planet’ (‘the planet’ being that thing we used to call ‘the world’) due to the extremely wobbly theory of man-made ‘climate change’, which takes on ever-more daft proportions.
Just the other day, UN Secretary General António Guterres referred to ‘global boiling’, while I was sitting at home in a jumper on a July day watching news reports about fires in Greece (which we now know were mainly started by arsonists) while wind and rain lashed against my window.
No doubt any day now Sir David Attenborough will pop up on TV and tell me that the snow leopard is dying out and it’s all my fault because I won’t replace my boiler with an expensive, unreliable and noisy heat pump.
But how do councils and governments actually expect us to commute to and from work if we are supposed to ditch our cars?
Lots of public money is thrown at campaigns and so-called ‘charities’ encouraging us to cycle more. Yet how practical is this for most people? Who among us has jobs where it is acceptable to turn up in soaking wet clothes, or, on a rare hot summer’s day, sweating and in need of a shower?
The businessman with his laptop and briefcase or the tradesman with his tools cannot be expected to cycle to his place of work.
Then there are the railways. Where do I start? Trains should, in theory, be my favourite form of travel. They are fast and sympathetic to the countryside.
The reality is altogether different. Rail commuters are having to put up with endless strikes, baffling timetables, illogical ticket prices and train guards who are highly-officious if somebody is travelling with the wrong ticket, yet hide for cover if that carriage is taken over by drunken yobs late at night.
Add to that the removal of the InterCity125 from the West Coast Main Line and its replacement with the horrible new Hitachi trains. For those unfamiliar with these monstrosities, commuters are forced to sit bolt upright on thin, ironing board-like seats, which are too narrow and the lighting too bright for night time travel. To make matters worse, there is no buffet car and a trolley selling light snacks at high prices are the only refreshments on offer. The journey back to Bristol, Cardiff or Swansea after a tiring day in London is not a very appealing one. The days of being able to board an InterCity 125, sink into a comfy seat, pull the curtain, dim the lighting and enjoy a warm snack with a glass of wine or beer are gone.
The much-missed InterCity 125
The revival in rail travel since the mid-1990s has nothing to do with the supposed ‘success’ of privatisation, and everything to do with the reality that rocketing house prices mean more and more of us are forced to live vast distances from our places of work.
Christian Wolmar’s excellent book British Rail: A New History provides a fascinating insight into the 50-year life of the nationalised rail industry. It was widely-detracted in the 1960s, but by the early 1990s, in the years immediately before privatisation, British Rail was well-run, and trains were an enjoyable, affordable way to travel.
A quarter-of-a-century after privatisation, rail travel is complicated, unreliable, expensive and the ticketing system is beyond any kind of logic.
There is also the reality that in this post-Beeching age, many of us do not live near a railway station. Towns with sizeable populations such as Abingdon in Oxfordshire do not have a railway station.
In my home city of Cardiff, the whole of the east of the city is not served at all by rail transport. In the north of the city, a two-mile long stretch was closed by Beeching and housing built on the land. What was once a straightforward journey between two northern suburbs now involves going into the city centre and back out again.
Buses used to provide a rapid and efficient way of getting around towns and cities, but alas, that came to an end when bus conductors were withdrawn.
In the era of bus conductors, the bus would halt briefly at the bus stop, passengers would hastily get on and off (often with doors located at the front and rear), the bus would then zoom off and fares would be paid to the conductor while the bus was in motion.
Nowadays, bus travel is a tedious process, with long waits at each stop as passengers pay the driver, or, in recent years, faff around trying to align the bar code on their phone app with the scanner. This makes bus travel slow, dreary and unpleasant, especially after a long day’s work when you just want to get home as quickly as possible.
A bus conductor helps an elderly passenger to board a London Routemaster bus in the 1980s
The overarching theme is that public transport is expensive, inconvenient and unreliable. If you do a job where getting to work on time is imperative, you cannot rely on public transport. A doctor or a nurse replacing a colleague coming off shift, a schoolteacher with a classroom full of children waiting to begin a lesson or a dentist with a full day of appointments starting at 9am cannot be kept waiting by rickety public transport.
The big motivation of politicians ‘behind the scenes’ isn’t so much ‘climate change’ dogma as a need to find new ways to tax and control the population. As a society, we are living way beyond our means, and the welfare state in its current form is unaffordable. The state has taken on more and more responsibilities which once belonged to the individual and the family (such as making sure children receive a decent meal each day).
We are a noticeably poorer society than we once were. When I grew up in the 1980s and 90s, an early-morning walk in Cardiff would be accompanied by the sight and sound, not only of milk floats, but also of street sweeping machines and characters like Brian Richards MBE out and about with his broom.
Public bins were emptied daily, and in the city centre, free public toilets were easily accessible, maintained by a steward and never more than a few minutes’ walk away. Every suburban shopping street had public toilets, most had free car parking.
Nowadays, the public toilets have gone, the car parking is expensive, the bins are emptied only occasionally and the pavements are sticky (especially in Cardiff city centre). We, as taxpayers, are paying more and more, but are getting less and less in return.
The need to find new ways of taxing us is what ultimately fuels these anti-car measures, but no matter what the silly rhetoric says, cars are a necessity, not a luxury, for millions of working people.
Marcus Stead
The war against the car and the absurdity of ‘green’ policies
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By MARCUS STEAD
THE WAR ON THE MOTORIST is becoming ever-more absurd. The situation with Sadiq Khan and ULEZ in London is getting the bulk of the media attention, but there are similar daft concepts being imposed by councils up and down the country.
Here in Wales, Mark Drakeford’s government is making 20mph the default speed limit on restricted roads from September.
Drakeford’s government never misses an opportunity to nanny and fuss in our lives. Throughout the pandemic, restrictions were lifted later and more cautiously than in England, and there was a growing sense among the Welsh public that he was being ‘different for the sake of being different’.
At its most absurd in late 2020, the Drakeford government forced supermarkets to seal off aisles selling toasters, kettles, socks and children’s toys.
Yes, that actually happened! You were free to fill your supermarket trolley up with as much booze as you wished, but you were not permitted to replace your broken kettle or buy a toy to keep your child occupied during long, boring days at home when they could not go to school or mix with their friends.
The theory behind it was that local hardware stores were not permitted to open, therefore to make it a ‘level playing field’ supermarkets would not be permitted to sell such items, but the absurdity of it was clear to see.
Few members of the Welsh Government have had any meaningful experience of the private sector. Starting businesses, running businesses and an entrepreneurial attitude to life are not on their radar. Cabinet positions are dominated by people whose previous professional experience was in social services, the trade union movement, the teaching profession, the charity sector and in Welsh political journalism. Private enterprise is a world they neither know nor understand.
All these measures on making car use prohibitively expensive is, in theory, being done in the name of ‘saving the planet’ (‘the planet’ being that thing we used to call ‘the world’) due to the extremely wobbly theory of man-made ‘climate change’, which takes on ever-more daft proportions.
Just the other day, UN Secretary General António Guterres referred to ‘global boiling’, while I was sitting at home in a jumper on a July day watching news reports about fires in Greece (which we now know were mainly started by arsonists) while wind and rain lashed against my window.
No doubt any day now Sir David Attenborough will pop up on TV and tell me that the snow leopard is dying out and it’s all my fault because I won’t replace my boiler with an expensive, unreliable and noisy heat pump.
But how do councils and governments actually expect us to commute to and from work if we are supposed to ditch our cars?
Lots of public money is thrown at campaigns and so-called ‘charities’ encouraging us to cycle more. Yet how practical is this for most people? Who among us has jobs where it is acceptable to turn up in soaking wet clothes, or, on a rare hot summer’s day, sweating and in need of a shower?
The businessman with his laptop and briefcase or the tradesman with his tools cannot be expected to cycle to his place of work.
Then there are the railways. Where do I start? Trains should, in theory, be my favourite form of travel. They are fast and sympathetic to the countryside.
The reality is altogether different. Rail commuters are having to put up with endless strikes, baffling timetables, illogical ticket prices and train guards who are highly-officious if somebody is travelling with the wrong ticket, yet hide for cover if that carriage is taken over by drunken yobs late at night.
Add to that the removal of the InterCity125 from the West Coast Main Line and its replacement with the horrible new Hitachi trains. For those unfamiliar with these monstrosities, commuters are forced to sit bolt upright on thin, ironing board-like seats, which are too narrow and the lighting too bright for night time travel. To make matters worse, there is no buffet car and a trolley selling light snacks at high prices are the only refreshments on offer. The journey back to Bristol, Cardiff or Swansea after a tiring day in London is not a very appealing one. The days of being able to board an InterCity 125, sink into a comfy seat, pull the curtain, dim the lighting and enjoy a warm snack with a glass of wine or beer are gone.
The revival in rail travel since the mid-1990s has nothing to do with the supposed ‘success’ of privatisation, and everything to do with the reality that rocketing house prices mean more and more of us are forced to live vast distances from our places of work.
Christian Wolmar’s excellent book British Rail: A New History provides a fascinating insight into the 50-year life of the nationalised rail industry. It was widely-detracted in the 1960s, but by the early 1990s, in the years immediately before privatisation, British Rail was well-run, and trains were an enjoyable, affordable way to travel.
A quarter-of-a-century after privatisation, rail travel is complicated, unreliable, expensive and the ticketing system is beyond any kind of logic.
There is also the reality that in this post-Beeching age, many of us do not live near a railway station. Towns with sizeable populations such as Abingdon in Oxfordshire do not have a railway station.
In my home city of Cardiff, the whole of the east of the city is not served at all by rail transport. In the north of the city, a two-mile long stretch was closed by Beeching and housing built on the land. What was once a straightforward journey between two northern suburbs now involves going into the city centre and back out again.
Buses used to provide a rapid and efficient way of getting around towns and cities, but alas, that came to an end when bus conductors were withdrawn.
In the era of bus conductors, the bus would halt briefly at the bus stop, passengers would hastily get on and off (often with doors located at the front and rear), the bus would then zoom off and fares would be paid to the conductor while the bus was in motion.
Nowadays, bus travel is a tedious process, with long waits at each stop as passengers pay the driver, or, in recent years, faff around trying to align the bar code on their phone app with the scanner. This makes bus travel slow, dreary and unpleasant, especially after a long day’s work when you just want to get home as quickly as possible.
The overarching theme is that public transport is expensive, inconvenient and unreliable. If you do a job where getting to work on time is imperative, you cannot rely on public transport. A doctor or a nurse replacing a colleague coming off shift, a schoolteacher with a classroom full of children waiting to begin a lesson or a dentist with a full day of appointments starting at 9am cannot be kept waiting by rickety public transport.
The big motivation of politicians ‘behind the scenes’ isn’t so much ‘climate change’ dogma as a need to find new ways to tax and control the population. As a society, we are living way beyond our means, and the welfare state in its current form is unaffordable. The state has taken on more and more responsibilities which once belonged to the individual and the family (such as making sure children receive a decent meal each day).
We are a noticeably poorer society than we once were. When I grew up in the 1980s and 90s, an early-morning walk in Cardiff would be accompanied by the sight and sound, not only of milk floats, but also of street sweeping machines and characters like Brian Richards MBE out and about with his broom.
Public bins were emptied daily, and in the city centre, free public toilets were easily accessible, maintained by a steward and never more than a few minutes’ walk away. Every suburban shopping street had public toilets, most had free car parking.
Nowadays, the public toilets have gone, the car parking is expensive, the bins are emptied only occasionally and the pavements are sticky (especially in Cardiff city centre). We, as taxpayers, are paying more and more, but are getting less and less in return.
The need to find new ways of taxing us is what ultimately fuels these anti-car measures, but no matter what the silly rhetoric says, cars are a necessity, not a luxury, for millions of working people.
Written by Marcus Stead
July 31, 2023 at 3:51 am
Posted in Business, Comment, Opinion, Politics