In the Sun this week, long-time defender of road users and the Reform Party’s former candidate for London Mayor, Howard Cox, finds “proof that the war on drivers has been revved up”. In 2023, 18 million penalty charge notices (PCNs) were given to motorists for various infractions. As Cox relates, many believe the rules these drivers have broken are designed, not to regulate the efficient and proper use of the road, but to rinse money from hapless drivers. One hatched yellow box (road markings into which vehicles are not permitted to stop) in Hammersmith raised £2.7 million for the the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. But this war on motorists, and against the car, does not begin and end here.
Cars are, of course, public enemy #1 as far as extreme green-leaning local authorities under the control of all legacy parties are concerned. Over recent years, we’ve seen the increasing, and arguably often unnecessary regulation of speed, the closure of roads to create Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), congestion charges, Clean Air Zones (CAZs), Moving Traffic Violations (MTVs), and lethal Smart Motorways, all of which create new, and often confusing conditions for road use. And of course, these new regulatory interventions are enforced by financial penalties, which fall disproportionately on those who are less able to pay, but who drive out of economic necessity. Failing to pay within a certain time limit typically results in the doubling of the fine. And failing to pay that can soon result in visits from poorly regulated and aggressive bailiffs.
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The private car is ofcourse the best means of transport. It enables you to go from your front door to any other front door in the country. But the Collectivism of the One Worlder’s see the car as they see everything else they want to banish from civilisation. This all emanates from the UN/WEF Sustainable Development politics that thinks our standard of living is too high. They think our lifestyles are unsustainable. Whether that involves having our own private transport (car) or flying to other countries in planes, using up natural resources for heating or air conditioning, eating land intensive meat etc etc. This is not some conspiracy theory. It is all made perfectly clear in black and white by the Davos One World Government people who see “us” as a pain in the neck. Their solution to the nuisance that is “us” is a world run by technocrats that we have never heard of and never voted for controlling all of the world’s wealth and resources and all aspects of our life. —-Global Communism. The worrying thing is that our own Political Class are mostly fully onboard with this as they seek to impose the collectivist Net Zero on us.
I am really beginning to wonder if this can be resolves without much bloodshed. I would rather kill myself then be some sort of cattle at the behest of the Globalist class. But I’d never want to leave before taking a few scumbags with me.
Just over 80% of those that did bother to vote in 2024 voted for establishment parties. If people would support and vote for challenger parties and independents then change would more likely happen.
It is a case of “Vote X, get Y”.
The establishment parties are fully onboard because people who should know better keep voting for them. Take a leaf out of the swampies book and make establishment party MPs lives hell as well as never ever voting for them. Make those MPs fear the power of the motorist lobby more than they fear NGOs, think tanks, powerful influencers and the swampies.
As a retired railway engineer, who does run a car and makes use of a variety of main roads as well, I must say that it’s not just roads that attract the criticism of the greenies and NIMBYs. Look at the heavy capital outlay on projects like HS2 that are done to appease the latter, e.g. Looking on the bright side, it’s resulted in a lot of work for tunnel boring machines – but imported from Germany.
Worth noting that the overall structure of the railway network is quite similar to that of the M road one that you display. Similar problems with east/west capacity across the Pennines, e.g.
On a more positive note, there are some new road jobs happening now – such as the “missing link” project: https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-roads/south-west/a417-missing-link/ Avoid like the plague except on Sundays or Xmas day while that’s being done!
There is a big project in progress to improve the M25-A3 junction to prove more space to avoid queues on both roads. It has cost taxpayers more as there is lots of eco-bollocks added on to it. A badly needed improvement on the A27 to bypass Arundel has been dumped by Robot Reeves, the pensioners thief, leaving it a mish mash of dual carriageway and slow single carriageway.
If only we could understand the implications of that one simple fact and mobilise ourselves accordingly.
Watch out the DPP Stasi are looking at us, my God what a rapid fall into Marxism in only a few weeks, this country is now on a terrifying road.
Yes, I have thought about that a lot recently. So let me clarify: we should mobilise ourselves using legal, peaceful, protest and by signing some petitions. These are the options open to us under a democratic system. Only when the state is deemed to have become tyrannical by the majority of the population should other methods of dissent be necessary.
No truly democratic state can disagree with that statement.
Yes. But somehow we have to get people to realise that we are frogs being boiled slowly and surreptitiously.
Reform UK is that vehicle.
Road Tax very clearly is not used to improve the terrible state of our roads, likewise the safety cameras (ha), are nothing of the sort they are purely there to rinse motorists, likewise the agressive wardys that patrol our streets bonused on every teeny tiny infraction they can make, I have caught a number of them out through persuing council claims, many the time that they accuse an infraction, when camera evidence etc is asked for the evidence is plainly not there, but how many people actually challenge?
The yellow average speed camera’s, the cameras in bus lanes cycle lanes, LTN’S, charges to enter towns, cities, extortionate car parking charges. Then of course lets return to the Road tax, for example if you own a car like a Boxter or indeed any car no matter how old it is, even if you bought it as a used car, the Road tax value will be based on its original purchase price, whats that about? Why?.
Like all of these and more that are used against the Driver its a form of taxation intended to take as much from us as they can, such that they can spaff on pet projects that make life worse for us but from which they can get pats on the head and no doubt funds from their sponsors.
I believe it is now the duty of every citizen to avoid paying tax wherever possible. I have never been asked about taxpayers money being used for “foreign aid,’ nor in supporting fake charidees such as Hope not Hate, the RNLI and ALL the rest, fighting illegal wars, purchasing millions of dangerous “vaccines” and fake PCR tests etc etc etc, so if opportunities arise which allow for tax to be avoided we have a responsibility to act accordingly.
Taxation should be used for the good of the people and not simply to line pockets.
There comes a point at which tax becomes extortion. We reached that point decades ago. When you put 40 quid’s worth of petrol in your car, you actually only get 20 quid’s worth as the other 20 quid’s worth goes to the government. Even the Mafia wouldn’t dare to extort you like this.
And now Labour are rolling out LTNs across the country, don’t remember it in their manifesto, or talking about it al all, funny that!
Start with the BBC. Most on here don’t pay it I’m guessing LOL. Remember the Registration Document is not proof of ownership. Sovereign Pete is the expert on all of that, but since the rollout of LTNs, more people have been learning about that so that is a good thing.
They’ve made it perfectly clear what the objective is: 15 minute cities where you live, work and socialise within 15 minutes of your home and private transport (other than a bike) is verboten.
For those who live outside a city or conurbation then your ability to travel will be severely restricted and you will be charged a fortune for travelling anywhere by private car (road pricing).
Only the wealthy will be able to afford to run a car.
They have decided that we don’t need more motorway construction because they are going to solve the congestion problem by pricing people off the roads and making them use our piss-poor public transport network.
The best method of fighting back is to refuse to play their game. Don’t buy an EV; only use public transport if you really want to (sometimes, ie a trip to Heathrow) it is the better option. Use your car.
The National Plan that Stanley Johnson mentioned. The good thing about some old people, like himself and Biden, in their old age they let things slip out.
“The same Cold War effect” – but this ignores another reason for a creaking road system: this is a small country trying to support an over large population. One of the things that struck me when we had free EU movement was that most
people moving here as individuals would need a car and thus create overuse of our road infrastructure. Government has to rationalise population numbers to infrastructure resources which includes roads.
The anti-car lobby has not thought through the implications of car restrictions. For instance, if car use is reduced or even made prohibitively expensive, then that would be the death knell for the National Trust. It’s properties are only sensibly accessible by car; and no
visitors would mean no funds and no volunteers!
It’ll be the death knell for most tourist attractions outside of cities and major conurbations, not just the NT.
I know what you’re saying…..Back in 2005 I had a Polish girlfriend and her friends came over and I had to take them to look at an old Audi A6 (first generation) I remember because the blond girl had a short skirt and nice legs.
people object to battery farming of hens. Yet what are 15 minute cities other than battery farming of people?
If the authorities decide your social credit is zero because you said something they don’t like, or want to stop you spreading infected thought, they simply put a travel ban on you and you can’t buy a bus or train ticket in the cashless society. A private car negates their power to do this. This is Chinese dictatorship. It’s on its way here. Join the party comrades. Or starve.
Also an EV could be programmed to take you straight to the police Station.
The giveaway about it being anti-car, as opposed to also providing sustainable transport alternatives, is the complete lack of interest from the TPTB in improving public transport or the cycling network within our urban areas.
In my northern city, public transport has tangibly deteriorated since the Covid madness, along with rail services. Also no interest in any new bike routes, other than some token ones in the town centre.
It’s always noticeable in any other Western European country (even including Portugal and Italy) how underground car parks are standard in towns and cities, even very small ones, hence parking is usually straightforward and cars obstruct streets much less. Also generally more bike lanes, far less potholes, just more investment in the transport infrastructure overall.
Ok until the older EVs catch fire….
“As the statistics relating to road building show, we are not short of space, we are short of roads to take us to space to expand into. We are hemmed-in by insufficient roads, and we haven’t been allowed to build more to match the pace of population growth, or to take pressure away from urban centres.”
Well, left to our own devices, white British people decided that we had enough people (at least enough white British people) and stopped having so many children. All other things being equal, the roads we have/had would probably be more or less sufficient. I love a road, but I think if you took away the tens of millions that have been added to our population from external sources I dare say we might decide that the trade off between convenient roads and the expense and disruption of building more had been reached.
I’m unfortunately unable to say this in English because I’m lacking too many words, but it has to be said, anyway:
Die Lehre vom sogenanten „Klimawandel“ ist eine menschenverachtende, totalitäre Ideologie.
Indeed so. Fascistic you could say.
No, I actually couldn’t because I have no desire to use Nazis as convenient umbrella term for “my political opponents, whoever they are and whatever their actual opinions happen to be”. Even when using fascism in the stricter sense, the climate change agitators have certainly no desire to unify society along the lines of cooperation of guild and trade associations thought of as limbs of the unified body of the nation state roughly modelled on medieval society. They’re seekling to abolish traditions they all believe to be harmful in favour of Something Completely New And Different And Very Much Improved™, not to revitalize them.
But thank you for immediately “20th century bombing” a useful idea. and thus, canalizing discussion of it into the usual 20th century obsession. A latter of thanks from the IPCC et al is in the post.
Elaborating on this a little: The totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century understood history as eternal struggle between different groups of people they would divide into the good and bad people, ie, those who ought to win this struggle and those who needed to be beaten thoroughly to accomplish that.
The climate protection agitators are qualitatively different: To them, people are uniformly the enemy and they need to be reduced to a rather sorry state of pennance and existence (or even non-existence) for the benefit of a 5.9 billion trillion metric tons ball of stone orbiting around the sun with a speed of about 29.7km/s.
But we aren’t on a ball of stone orbiting around the sun, with Kiwis & Aussies dangling upside-down like fruit bats, while the ocean somehow clings on as well, curving around the ball.
Rather, imagine that the entire world is on the flat lens of the eye of a creature very much larger than ourselves, while we are each about the size of a photon.
But we aren’t on a ball of stone orbiting around the sun, with Kiwis & Aussies dangling upside-down like fruit bats, while the ocean somehow clings on as well, curving around the ball.
The beauty of gravity is that down is always towards the center and up always away from it. Hence, Kiwis and Aussies can stand upright on the outside of the opposite half of the sphere. Or we can, depending on how you look at it.
But that’s really an aside to the point I was trying to make which works as well for a flat lens on the eye of a creature very much larger than ourselves as it does for the abovementioned ball of stone: The climate agitators are not concerned with the improvement of human affairs but with the hypothetical benefit of something very much outside of our own affairs and beyond our ability to influence. And they seek to sacrifice humans for it.
I completely agree with your final two sentences, but not with the rest.
I’m not convinced that gravity exists, only density and buoyancy, as some say, nor that tides are caused by the moon. Tides seem more like the regular breathing of something very large compared to us, slowly breathing in and out. Where does all that water go when the tides are out, I wonder? If you look at a tide map of the world, all the water in the Atlantic Ocean, for example, recedes at more or less the same time from the shores of the eastern US and western Europe. It’s not the moon pulling the water towards the middle.
Aussies & Kiwis are not “Down Under”—they’re “Across”, as on the lens of an eye. Is that why the Illuminati celebrities are so often photographed showing only one eye? And if we’re all on one eye, where’s the other eye, when it’s at home? It’s all very interesting.
I just noticed the small print motto under The Daily Sceptic logo at the top of this page, which seems very apt at this moment:
“Question Everything. Stay Sane. Live Free.”
In one of the early Holmes stories, Watson describes his surprise upon finding out that Holmes had never heard about the idea that there’s a solar system of multipe planets all orbiting around a central sun. This leads the detective into a small lecture about how the human mind/ memory resembles an attic with limited storage capability and that everyone would be well advised to avoid storing stuff there which is of no conceivable use to him. Like the Copernican theories about the solar system he plans to forget about as soon as possible.
The same applies here to the question about the exact nature of the world we find ourselves living in. It doesn’t matter for the topic at hand.
The population is demoralised and stripped of any self esteem. Evidence of how badly is that they allowed themselves to be forced/strongly coerced to cover their faces for two years and take experimental jabs – both of which were completely unnecessary and could easily be seen to be so at the time.
The chances the public (in anything like sufficient numbers) will fight back to retain the freedoms cars give them is exactly zero.
But Masks & Jabs are not cars and Gas Boilers….They will have a shock, but it won’t go unnoticed this time.
To continue the nasty little fascist’s example, if your mum was being raped and murdered and you bashed the culprit over the head with a cricket bat the fuzz would still nick you and release you only after you had proved that your mum was being raped and that the person you beat up was the culprit.
And that you used proportional amount of violence.
None of these considerations apply in the case of climate change activism.
Next Tuesday.
“Perhaps the automobile as a symbol of liberty ceased to have as much political utility after the Cold War”
Since the Covid PsyOp, a few have pointed this out. No need to advance prosperity for the masses now that the Wall is down.
Where were all the “Green” protesters when that Evil Beeching was cutting 5000 miles of railways in Britain, in cahoots with the car manufacturers?
If there’s one way to make an already faltering economy grind to a halt it is by abolishing private transport. The pushback to all this will come when this all starts affecting rural communities, who are hard-pressed to survive without a private vehicle. The UK’s rural population is estimated to be about 9.7 million people, which represents about 14-17% of the country’s population. All getting by on public transport? Good luck with that… In my region you’re lucky if you live within a mile of a bus stop (where buses come by at best every couple of hours) and rail is non-existent unless you’re leaving the county!
People….Need….Cars.
It’s not only new roads that need building but the old ones need maintenance. The main road through our village has pot holes everywhere. We’ve only lived here 7 months but they were there when we arrived and still nobody seems to be doing anything about it. I also cycle around the area quite a bit and it’s the same everywhere I go. Even the nearby A6 into Bedford is an utter disgrace and frankly dangerous. No one seems to care.
An excellent article with which I am in 100% agreement. Our self-flagellation on the car and other technological advancements is unfathomable and unfounded on anything that stands up to basic scientific scrutiny.
“The real war on cars is a war on freedoms of all kinds, which governments and their armies of wonks now believe are theirs to grant or restrict at will.”
Absolutely. This is the crux of the matter and emanates from the UN and WEF Agenda 2030. Unelected Globalists who have become the masters of our woke, feeble and corrupt governments.
What car we drive or how we heat our homes should be none of their business. Net zero is the stick they use to justify the scam and abuse of our rights and freedoms.
On the South Coast, the M27 continues eastward as the dualled A27 up to Lewes, except for two major gaps. At Worthing the houses bought to dual were all sold back because they ran out of money and the planned Arundel bypass has just been cancelled by the Labour government. As between Lewes and the A22 at Eastbourne, they built a small extension but only made it THREE lanes for a combined A26/A27 to leave room for an empty cycle track, which goes all the way with its own bridges beside slow moving traffic to the A22. As a country we really are pathetic and kowtowing to the green lobby..
That is why I despise everyone at the BBC….Even the people there that just make the Tea!
I well remember, living in the South of England, the battles to improve traffic flow, from the Newbury by pass, the M3 extension, the short stretch of A35 dualling and the A303 dualling. The protests, the disruption, all in opposition to the wants and needs of the local population who were desparate for these improvements to relieve the traffic, mainly caused by the trendy sets from London and the Midlands, going to their holidays in the South West. You can imaging my surprise, therefore, visiting Northumbria during the era of Blair, the massive extent of new and improved roads north of Birmingham through Yorkshire and around Newcastle, all built without opposition from the green left wing protestors, presumably to speed up the access of the local Labour MPs to their Northern homelands.