Mike Rutherford's column

	The Lib Dems are guilty of mindless and brutal discrimination against the car, its industry, and most importantly of all, motorists

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. Britain’s third-largest political party has released official details of how it plans to outlaw the conventional family motor car. Mercifully, the Lib Dems are a bunch of no-hopers that have for decades been desperate to run Britain, but repeatedly failed in their attempts to win a general election. And the long run of failure is bound to continue now that the party has admitted, in the clearest terms, that it is crushingly anti-car, but overwhelmingly pro-train.

It knows for certain that subsidy-free car drivers and their passengers represent the vast majority of the electorate and that train travellers make up a comparatively tiny, heavily subsidised minority. Yet democracy, Liberal Democrat-style, is perverted, because it says that the many who pay their way (car users) should be treated worse than the few who do not (train users).

A representative from the party has already been barking with evangelical passion about the plan to abolish petrol-engined new cars within three decades. And although diesel and LPG vehicles were not mentioned, it seems certain they’re also for the axe under Lib Dem rule. In the unlikely event that the party does get to run the country, it supports “a target of zero carbon for all new cars by 2040”. If anybody fails to comply with this, the formal warning is that they will face, among other things, “penalties”. Think hefty fines.

Note that the call isn’t merely for carbon emissions to be reduced. The target is for them to be eliminated. But only if it’s cars that are doing the emitting. Is the party slapping a zero-carbon edict on buses, coaches, trains, trams, planes, ships, boats, lorries, vans, agricultural tractors, construction vehicles, motorcycles and other everyday vehicles by the 2040 deadline? No. Is it insisting on zero carbon homes, factories, offices, farms, hotels and power stations by 2040? Not a chance. Does this mean it’s guilty of mindless, brutal discrimination against the car, its industry and, most important of all, motorists? Absolutely.

The apparent revulsion the Lib Dem party has for motors is matched only by its loathing of the surfaces they travel on. When it talks about “introducing a presumption against the building of new roads” and promises to “shift the balance of spending from roads to rail”, I seriously wonder if the railway industry has some sort of hold over the party. Does it?

The argument from the LDs and others is that if too many new roads are constructed, parts of our green and pleasant land are inevitably covered in concrete, which in turn leaves scars on the landscape. Fair enough. They have a point. But how come the occasional new bypass or access road is unacceptable? Particularly when the party speaks about building a multi-billion pound “high-speed, north-south rail link”, which “would be extended to an east-west corridor” at a cost of further billions. A dedicated line for freight trains would swallow yet more money. “Some subsidy” might be needed for all the above, plus other expensive, car-loathing tricks the Lib Dems have up their sleeves. In other words, our motoring and general taxes will largely pay for this rail-obsessed fanaticism.

The good news is that these lunatics will not get in. The bad news is that you’ll have to vote either Conservative or Labour to keep them out. And these two have yet to reveal what they intend to do to motorists, if or when they win the next election...