Breaking The Cycle

No one in France or the Netherlands suggests that cyclists be required by law to wear helmets in order to protect them from motorists.

Cyclists also behave far better in those countries, obeying traffic lights and what have you. But no one, no one at all, suggests, as is taken for granted in Britain, that motorists somehow own the roads because of "we pay for them" through road tax and petrol duty.

Those are not particularly large contributions to the colossal central and local government cost of the road network that the car lobby seems convinced is somehow just there, yet somehow also paid for by road tax and by petrol duty. In spite of which, they are resented, even while also waved as a badge of virility, by that lobby.

So here is one for you: how about, as part of the comprehensive reorganisation of the tax and benefits system that the Labour Party will have to devise between now and the next General Election, a headline-grabbing, fully costed commitment to reduce petrol duty dramatically, and either to do the same to road tax or else, quite conceivably, to abolish it altogether? Accompanied, quite legitimately, by a standard set of carrot and stick measures to improve the behaviour of cyclists.

Jeremy Clarkson, of the newly Labour Ward of Chipping Norton, what would you say? You would be saying something quite different a couple of years later, when the implications had sunk in. By then, though, it would be too late.

Ed Miliband, over to you.