Mike Rutherford's column

In the biggest political shake-up in four decades, the nation has decided that the motorist-loathing Labour Party should pay the price for relentlessly beating up drivers for several years. Finally, innocent, fed-up, ripped-off, bruised and battered car user victims gave as good as they got by kneeing the guilty aggressors in the ballot boxes at the local elections. Now that’s my idea of democracy!

But the best news is Labour’s Chief Car Hater, Ken Livingstone, has finally been spanked and dumped as the capital’s Mayor. And that dismissal is significant in view of the fact that, after the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London is arguably the most powerful politician in England, if not Britain.

I know what you’re thinking: you don’t live in London, you don’t go there and you don’t care about the shenanigans. Fair enough. Yet wherever you live in England (and, to a lesser extent, the rest of Britain), what happens in this city should concern you greatly, because the place is a cruel proving ground-cum-insane experimental laboratory for elsewhere. Underestimate the positive and negative power of this over-influential town at your peril.

When Livingstone seized the place as his own scandal-ridden fiefdom, he introduced a £5 a day congestion tax that quickly rose to £8 and was (until he was booted out by the residents of London) scheduled to rise to £25 later this year. He called owners of all-wheel-drive cars “idiots”. He craftily avoided his own congestion taxes by spending thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on thirsty, congestion tax-free cabs. He wanted 20mph imits across London. He sabotaged the idea of free-flowing traffic thanks to endless road closures, badly phased lights and 24-hour bus lanes seven days a week – even when buses don’t run 24/7. Parking fees in ‘his’ city hit around £50 a day.

He introduced gas-guzzling, cash-guzzling, road space-guzzling bendy buses that are as long and inappropriate as artic lorries. Violent crime and fare dodging are common on Livingstone’s bus and rail network. He charged an exorbitant £4 to travel even for a few seconds* on rancid, crime-ridden Underground trains that are notorious for failing, forcing passengers occasionally to disembark and walk through terrifyingly dark, dirty tunnels.

Talking of terror, Livingstone appointed a former member of a banned terrorist organisation to the board of Transport for London. And the Mayor said there was nothing wrong with Abu Hamza’s son working as a sub-contractor on the capital’s train system. Public transport unions collectively donated more than £100,000 to Ken’s election campaign.

The scandals, sleaze and controversies didn’t end there. Whisky at work, cover-ups, racist slurs, punch-ups, dodgy friends and acquaintances and hypocrisy were among Livingstone’s other flaws. Had he been voted back in, the man’s blatant discrimination against cars and car people would have intensified. But thankfully, the elections ended the reign of Livingstone and the entire motorist-hostile Labour regime. And, in the run-up to the General Election, some 30 million or so drivers – with a similar number of votes up their sleeves – have demonstrated they have more collective clout than maybe they had realised.

*A single fare from Embankment to Charing Cross by Tube costs £4. The journey lasts about one minute.