The Loony Green Save-the-little-foxy-woxy Fascists are not known for their strict adherence to facts, preferring the emotional "it's all your fault" approach to life. Their latest lunacy just about takes the biscuit, though.
Owners of 4x4 vehicles (that's cars that are driven through all four wheels instead of just two, for the uninitiated) have recently come under fire for their choice of transport. "Two wheels good, four wheels bad", apparently. Some have had insulting leaflets placed under their windscreen wipers, and a few have even had their cars damaged.
What makes it worse is that this vicious and baseless prejudice has been endorsed by some well-known figures like Ken Livingstone, and there are now suggestions that 4x4 vehicles should be subject to higher levels of Road Tax and even banned from some locations.
The claim is that they pollute the environment more than other cars, and that they take up an unreasonable amount of space on the roads. Neither is true.
Certainly there are some very large 4x4's that burn a lot of petrol and take up a lot of room. But then there are some ordinary cars that do that - I was passed on the dual carriageway the other day by a Bentley that was doing at least 110 m.p.h., was twice the length of my own car and probably gets no more than 15 m.p.g. I saw a high-performance luxury saloon car reviewed recently that did 10 m.p.g. The bloke down the road from me has an old preserved fire-engine that burns enormous amounts of diesel, pours out black smoke and is the size of a double-decker bus. But it's driven on only two wheels, so I suppose that's all right, is it?
The majority of 4x4's I see on the roads are things like the Honda CRV, the Toyota Rav4 and the Nissan X-trail - modest in size, with perfectly ordinary petrol or diesel engines and a performance completely similar to your average mid-size saloon. They are simply taller, and have a 4-wheel drive-train - that's all. The Nissan X-Trail now outsells their most common mid-range saloon in this country, is known to be a soundly-built and comfortable car, has much the same "footprint" as a Ford Mondeo and gets better than 35 miles to the gallon. What's wrong with that? I'd quite like one myself. The Toyota is even smaller.
It's perfectly true that the really big 4x4's can be annoying. They are no safer than ordinary cars (but look how car safety has improved over the last fifteen years or so - in the early 1990s we'd have been hailing them as a triumph of accident-prevention) but they go just as fast. It can be galling to have a damn great Range Rover sweep past you in the fast lane at 90 m.p.h., and even worse is the feeling of invulnerability that makes them drive, at times, with great arrogance. We've all seen them, and I can't deny that they are irritating especially when you know how much their drivers have been able to pay for them.
And there's the rub, really, isn't it? The larger 4x4's are not just expensive, they are conspicuously expensive and that's what we object to. We don't like having our noses rubbed in it.
What worries me most is …. what next? When the trendy green save-the-whales-and-jump-on-any-bandwagon fascists have imposed their ill-informed will on 4x4 drivers, what will they set their sights on then? Sports cars? Soft-tops? Luxury cars? Old cars? (That'll be me, then!) Anything larger than a 2CV, probably. And most of us know what shabby, dirty, uncomfortable, uneconomic little brutes they are.
I've got a good idea: why don't we ban all Americans - they consume too much, pollute too much and take up too much space?
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