(sublinhados meus)
The sinister truth about the war on cars
When I was a girl in the 1970s, we didn’t have a car. We always took the train from our home in Bristol to the deep west of Devon and Cornwall. But when I got together with my third husband in 1995, I discovered the joy of driving — or rather, being driven, as I certainly wasn’t going to be the (sober) adult in the room if I could help it.
We acquired a black Mini (‘Geoff’) and most summers we’d motor all the way from Brighton to Portmeirion, in Wales. Not only was Geoff a Mini, but he even had black and white Union Jacks on the back of his mirrors; driving into the heartbreakingly beautiful Prisoner village in him felt very glamorous.
I was intoxicated with the state of being in cars for many years — nothing about our driving trips was too banal for me to exclaim over. Service stations were Aladdin’s Caves of untold treasure. Mr Raven compared me to ‘Brilliant Kid’ after the Fast Show character who got excited over everything after I became thrilled by being stuck at traffic lights, exclaiming: ‘Which is your favourite? Mine is the nice orangey one!’
Most of all I loved the beautiful, long, sexy motorways where the rushing of cars from the arterial roads made me think of the film Fantastic Voyage, all of us corpuscles streaming into the white-hot body politic of modern Britain. Life rarely seems more cinematic than when music you love plays in a car, and cars have contributed more classic songs to the canon than anything except love. As we moved from the slip-road to the motorway, I’d play Black Box Recorder’s best song (‘The English motorway system is beautiful and strange/It’s been there forever, it’s never going to change’) and I’d feel oceanic and loving towards mankind in a way which oceans themselves never make me feel.
I’d been having run-ins with the Greens since they were known as the Ecology party, led by Jonathon Porritt — aka Sir Jonathon Espie Porritt, 2nd Baronet. As I wrote way back in the twentieth century, in a play at the Royal Court called How Now Green Cow, noting the extraordinary poshness of ecologists: ‘The rich will always be friends of the Earth – it’s been a ruddy good friend to them.’
Those attempting to advocate for the rad-ness of King Charles like to bring up the fact that he’s been banging on about ecology forever as if that’s some daring thing for him to do, rather than just highlighting that conservation is conservative. The King believes that he’s been anointed by the Lord to oversee the flora, fauna and – lastly and least – the citizens of this country. It’s no coincidence that the most nature-loving hymn we sang as children is also the most socially hierarchal: ‘The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate/God made them high or lowly/And ordered their estate.’
But it was my love affair with motorways which crystallised the suspicion I felt about the Green design for life, which would see us condemned to eke out our lives in one little patch, never moving on for fear of spoiling the divine order. It’s a nice life for a tree, but no life for a human in all our restless and complex dynamism. Like so much about ecology, there seems a feudal impulse about the encroaching motoring puritanism, be it ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) or LTN (Low Traffic Neighbourhood), which sound like sexy new forms of electronic dance music but which are decidedly anti-fun.
What we are witnessing now is not a war on cars per se; it’s a war on the poor who dare to drive. Those who are rich can pay to pollute with the Mayor’s blessing, just as wealthy Just Stop Oil protestors will continue to have Instagram feeds which make Around The World In Eighty Days look like a stroll in the park.
The shameful squeezing out of the London proletariat from the city they built, into suburbs and satellite towns – despite still largely working in the centre – is being repeated in most cities across the country, so obviously many of those people will need their cars more than ever. But the post-Covid working from home boom has allowed a huge chunk of the middle-class workforce to opt out of having to travel to work; and as they already live near all the shops and doctors and schools they need, they’re more than happy to give up their cars and get on with the important business of virtue-signalling.
In Brighton we’ve just got rid of a Green council after twelve years. I really would advise anyone who thinks that the Greens are ‘good’ — even after the criticism they’ve subjected poor Shahrar Ali to for daring to stand up for women’s rights — or left-wing, come to that, when their disregard for the well-being of working-class people makes Debrett’s look democratic, to consider what happened here. It really seemed that they wanted no one from outside Brighton to ever visit Brighton – apart from all the over-privileged students who kept voting them in, of course. They did everything they could to make people stay home, from threatening to close down public toilets to making the pavements imperilled with overgrown weeds, but their main attack was through the war on cars.
Bella Sankey, the new Labour leader of the council, estimates that parking fees imposed by the Green council cost us more than £1 million in day-tripper revenue over three years. She blames the ‘incompetence’ of Green policies for a £3 million black hole in the city’s finances in which the loss in parking revenue makes up a significant part.
The plan to introduce Brighton’s first LTN in the Green stronghold of Hanover is thought to be what gave Labour their first council majority in more than two decades. Pleasingly, with poetic justice, the new council have pledged to re-allocate the £1 million set aside for LTN to refurbishing the city’s public conveniences — literally flushing the LTN fantasy down the toilet.
Let’s hope that more follows — we have long needed a new peasants’ revolt against this creeping Green feudalism. I’m so pleased that the Prime Minister has declared himself an unapologetic motor-lover; he may be the first PM to be richer than the actual king, but as the child of immigrants he understands the literal and metaphorical importance of mobility — of not being condemned to life in the place you just happened to be born in. Because make no mistake, the war against the car is a war against mobility, modernity and freedom.
‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’ asked billboards beside the roads of Britain during the war and after, encouraging drivers not to waste petrol — but do we want a life only of necessity? They’ll be taking away the weekend next — after all, nobody had one before capitalism. I’d love to see a motoring culture in which driving is done as a pleasure, every drive a wanted drive. It would be a shame if our anhedonia grew so all-consuming that the simple pleasure of driving towards somewhere nice on a sunny day with someone you love was also put beyond the pale.
Until then, cars are essential to the ever-dwindling allotment of ease and convenience the working-class have left. Bringing in ever more limitations on them won’t save your children’s lives; but it will, unless you’re rich, severely curtail the places they can go and the things they can do. If you want your children to have far more boring and limited lives than yours, carry on demonising the car.
I’ve only voted Tory once in my life, and that was for Brexit; I was aiming to do so again next time until Starmer remembered what a woman is — since when I’ve wavered. But if Sunak stands by his claim to turn the tide in this sinister crusade to turn us into serfs on bikes, pedalling humbly into some drab future in which only the wealthy enjoy themselves, he’s got my vote. And I still can’t drive.
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