We at GOS have always tried to avoid overt allegiance to any political party - though of course we've never seen any reason to make a secret of our disgust at and dislike for Nu Labour, its works and its representatives.
But it would be stupid to ignore - or pretend to ignore - any shreds of common sense in politics. We think we're absolutely right to criticise politics and politicians, but we also feel the need to acknowledge when any of them say or do the decent thing.
So we need to share with you a most astonishing document from the Conservative Party, which has burst like a ray of sunshine into the Stygian gloom of the Grumpy Old Study. It's a policy proposal (not a definitely-adopted bit of Conservative policy) from the think-tank The Conservative Way Forward, it's written by Malcolm Heymer and it's entitled "Stop the War against Drivers".
You can read the whole thing here - but we'll give you a few snippets to whet your appetites …
• "Road users contribute £44.6 billion in taxation to the Treasury every year, but only £7 billion is spent on the road network."
• "Around 63 per cent of the pump price of a litre of fuel is tax, the highest in Europe. Yet there are still some who claim that drivers do not pay enough to cover the social and environmental costs of motor vehicle use."
• "Another much repeated claim is that building new roads or widening existing ones simply generates more traffic. But a study of historic traffic data4 shows that growth is related to the state of the economy, not the level of investment in the road network. Traffic levels fell in the recession of 1978-79, rose sharply in the second half of the 1980s, then stagnated from 1990 to 1993. Traffic growth resumed in the mid 1990s, even though this was a period of declining investment in the road network."
• "Planning policies aimed at reducing car use have failed: limits on parking spaces in residential areas do not curb car ownership but increase on-street parking; reduced parking provision in town centres leads to more congestion as drivers search for spaces. Many local authorities, encouraged by government policies and funding arrangements, have taken road space from cars and lorries in an attempt to coerce drivers out of their cars and onto public transport and bicycles. In many cases the result has simply been more congestion, slower journeys, and damage to the viability of town centres."
• "Road safety policy, both at national and local level, has been driven as much by a covert desire to discourage car use as by the aim of reducing casualties. Many traffic calming schemes and reduced speed limits have been introduced without any objective safety justification, but have instead sought to dissuade drivers from using certain roads or areas."
• "The traditional 'Three Es' approach to road safety - engineering, education and enforcement - has been largely abandoned in favour of enforcement alone, especially of speed limits. This is an attractive option for government, as it involves relatively little expenditure while being able to claim, aided by a widespread misconception of the value of speed limits, that it is serious about improving road safety. But the result has been, since the mid 1990s, that the year-on-year decline in casualties of the previous three decades has stalled: between 1965 and 1994, road deaths per year had fallen from 7,952 to 3,650, but they only fell a further 449, to 3,201, by 2005."
• "The slowdown in the improvement of road safety has coincided with an explosion in the numbers of drivers penalised for exceeding speed limits. Between 1995 and 2004, annual speeding prosecutions in England and Wales rose from 206,900 to 2,104,800. This huge increase is due to the roll-out of automated speed camera enforcement, especially since the cost-recovery scheme has enabled camera partnerships to reclaim the costs of enforcement from the income produced by fixed penalties.
• In parallel with the increase in speed enforcement, many local authorities have taken over enforcement of parking regulations from the police, under the powers of the 1991 Road Traffic Act. As a result, prosecutions for obstruction, waiting and parking offences in England and Wales almost doubled between 1994 and 2004, from 4.4 million to 8.5 million."
• "All these practices show contempt for road users and the value of their time. Government and public agencies put their own convenience and interests before those of the public, whom they are meant to serve. A future Conservative government will take action to reverse these attitudes and the failed policies of the past, to give a fair deal for all road users."
• "… after accidents occur, traffic can be delayed for extended periods while the police gather evidence, on the assumption that one or more drivers must be guilty of an offence."
• "The narrow focus on speed and speed limit enforcement over the last decade has done a great deal to undermine respect for traffic laws and to damage Britain's road safety culture."
• "Traffic policing should be made a core police function and the resources provided to enable an increase in patrols by trained traffic officers."
• "Road safety policies based on hectoring drivers and punishing them for breaking inflexible and often arbitrary rules cause great resentment. No one likes being patronised, or being treated like a naughty child, and the result is often the opposite of that intended. The driving public should be treated like responsible adults, which most of them are."
The proposal is particularly down to earth on the subject of climate change and British drivers' alleged contribution to it …
"Claims that changes in global climate are the result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, are used as a pretext to demand increased taxes on vehicle use and restrictions such as lower speed limits. Yet the level of public debate about this highly complex subject has often been at a simplistic and emotive level, rather than a serious examination of the scientific evidence. Indeed, attempts to question the claimed `scientific consensus' are often met with abusive personal attacks designed to discourage dissenters - a clear sign that the issue has been hijacked for political purposes.
There are two questions that need to be considered: whether man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are actually changing the world's climate; and, even if they are, whether any action taken to reduce the UK's emissions could have a significant remedial impact at a global level.
On the first point, a scientific consensus on the causes of climate change does not exist, despite strenuous efforts to create that impression by those who wish to maintain and exploit public alarm. As explained by Dr Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, in an open letter to the Royal Society, the claimed link between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming does not even merit the scientific title of `theory'; it is merely a hypothesis, since causation has not been demonstrated in any conclusive way. He also points out that the recent warming trend began long before human-caused increase in carbon dioxide was evident.
The main alternative hypothesis to explain climate change is rapidly gaining credibility: variations in the sun's output of charged particles and in its magnetic field, linked to the sun-spot cycle, affect the flow of cosmic rays reaching the Earth's atmosphere, where they help to seed clouds. At times of high solar activity (such as recently), fewer cosmic rays reach the atmosphere so there is less cloud cover; more of the sun's heat radiation reaches the Earth's surface and the planet warms. When solar activity is low, more clouds form and reflect the sun's radiation back into space, so cooling takes place. Evidence is mounting to support this hypothesis and there are some scientists predicting a period of global cooling ahead, as solar activity decreases.
There is also nothing unprecedented about recent global temperatures or rates of change. There have been many fluctuations in temperature since the end of the last ice age, most recently the Medieval Warm Period of around a thousand years ago and the Little Ice Age that followed it. The existence of these natural fluctuations is an embarrassment to the proponents of man-made climate change, and attempts have been made to rewrite climate history to eliminate them. Also, since direct daily observations of temperature only began during the Little Ice Age, claims about recent temperatures being the `hottest ever recorded' are highly misleading.
Even if man-made carbon dioxide emissions were the cause of climate change, any measures that the UK could take to reduce its own emissions would have a negligible impact at a global level. In 2004, the UK emitted 158.09 million tonnes (carbon equivalent) of carbon dioxide, amounting to 2.1 per cent of the world total. Of the UK figure, 21.6 per cent came from road transport in 2004, or 0.46 per cent of the world total.
While road transport in the UK emits 34 million tonnes of carbon per year, China's total output of carbon dioxide in 2004 was 1,284 million tonnes (carbon equivalent), up from 1,063 million tonnes in 2003. Thus a single year's increase in carbon emissions by China, at 221 million tonnes, was six and a half times the output from road transport in Britain, or 40 per cent more than the UK's total emissions.
Any reduction that could be achieved in the UK's road transport emissions would be insignificant by comparison: a 10 per cent reduction would be negated in less than six days, if China's emissions continue to grow at their current rate. There can be no justification, therefore, for taxation increases or other restrictions that would affect mobility, on the grounds of tackling climate change. Suggesting that an example set by the UK would lead countries such as China and India to forgo the benefits of economic growth is risible.
Whether climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions is real and set to continue or not, responses to it need to be based on rational assessments of the costs and benefits of the options, not futile, damaging and expensive political gestures. This was the message delivered by the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs in its 2005 report, in which it also pointed out that there are positive aspects to global warming, such as fewer cold-related winter deaths. There is no justification for singling out the drivers of Britain as responsible for climate change."
The section on road safety has an interesting idea we haven't seen expressed before: statistics show that the safest drivers are those who travel within the 80th - 90th percentile of the speed range on a particular road. It therefore follows that if there is to be any speed limit on that road, it should be set to match the performance of these safest drivers. In other words, it should be the measured behaviour of drivers that determines the limit, not the opinion of road safety "experts" or the political expediency of local councillors. And I repeat, this is not in the interests of democracy, but in order to achieve the best possible safety performance on each particular road. What common sense. It'll never work.
This document should be required reading for all traffic planners and road safety "experts", for all those who are responsible for making decisions about our roads and our use of them, for "Brake" and all the other loony green tree-huggers who express opinions about our driving habits, for all MPs, and most of all for the current government which has done so much to alienate and criminalise ordinary people whenever they exercise their right to use the roads they have paid for many times over.
As we said above, this isn't Conservative Party policy. It should be. If it were, the party would win such support from ordinary people like ourselves that their success in the next election would be almost certain. If they then actually put it into practice, they'd deserve that success.
The GOS has a conservative MP, so he's writing to urge him to fight for this policy to be adopted by the party immediately. You're all drivers, and for once someone has put their brains in gear and stuck up for you - why don't you get writing too?
You can get an address for your own MP here.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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