The Road To Downing Street

Peter Hitchens has rightly been pointing out for years the basic factual error of those who imagined that motorists, as such, somehow owned the roads. And in what kind of country can Jeremy Clarkson be regarded as a figure of enormous influence over a key area of public policy, with something approaching a personal veto?

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, there ought if at all possible to be 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.

Jeremy Clarkson, of what is now the safely Labour Ward of Chipping Norton, what would you say to that? You would be saying something quite different a couple of years later, when the implications had sunk in.

Only in Britain do motorists imagine that somehow they own the roads because of "we pay for them" through road tax and petrol duty, which are not particularly large contributions to the colossal central and local government cost of the road network.

But by then, it would be too late.