“Labour's plans to tax and penalise car use are leading Britain into a former Soviet-style regime”

“Labour is using the car as a milch cow in a most dishonest way”

“The [Labour] Government's [anti-car] measures will take away what the car has given — mobility with freedom to travel as and when people please”

“Planned levies, tolls, charges, penalties and electronic speed cameras are, in reality, taxes. They are intended to raise revenue in addition to planned new and existing taxes on motoring”

“Road tolls are threatening disaster, cutting off areas of the country and towns, because it will become too expensive to transport goods... The impact threatens to be very serious...There will be no-go areas”

“Graduated vehicle excise duty ... poses a threat to Jaguar, Bentley, Rolls Royce and Land Rover. If a nation does not have a healthy home market for the cars it produces, it faces a serious situation. How can its economy prosper?”

“Graduated VED is very worrying. It will put the clock back”

“It would be wise of the Government to realise it is facing a tremendous public backlash to its next revenue raising attack on cars and road use. The outlook is alarming”

“We need to get away from the idea that persecuting the motorist is the answer to our environmental problems”

“There are many reasons to shift away from fossil fuels, and we will do so in the next century without legislation, financial incentives, carbon-conservation programs, or the indeterminable yammering of fearmongers. So far as I know, nobody had to ban horse transport in the early twentieth century”

“David Begg is a luddite if he thinks that bus travel is the be-all and end-all of everything.”

“Current planning policy guidance on new housing is tantamount to a war against cars, forcing us to provide insufficient car parking spaces on new developments. We cannot build double garages or even provide two parking spaces, an absurdity in the context of the two-car needs of most couples and families."
 
"It means builders are pushed into doing something which they know doesn't work, but nobody is listening. The consultation paper issued by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott on revisions to the PPG3 planning guidelines completely ignore the problem.”

“We recently built 46 apartments in the heart of Reading with 26 permitted parking spaces, and the first 26 to sell had their own spaces."
 
"Under the PPG3 planning guidance note, our customers are supposed to use buses and trai ns - but the transport infrastructure simply doesn't exist to satisfactory standards in most areas."
 
"In Milton Keynes, we are trying to sell a five-bedroomed house at £400,000-plus with single garage and one parking space - and this specific point makes it difficult to find a buyer. We wanted a double garage and two further spaces, but planners wouldn't hear of it.”

“... public opinion polls should not be the sole basis for political decision making ... the results are too dependent on the framing of the question ...”

“For much too long received wisdom has been that roads are 'baddies' and railroads are 'buddies', I refuse to sign this absurdity. We must turn the tide of the European transport policy and let Europe free of its politically correct shackles. The dislike of the minority for cars must not blind us to act in a counterproductive way.”

“It's one thing to have cameras to detect speeding motorists and those running red lights, but quite another having them looking inside cars and invading people's private space”

“The government, however, is even more idiotic. It wants us to buy the car, pay the Vat, and the tax, and the tax on the Vat, and the tax on the Vat on the fuel in the tank. And then it wants us to leave it at home and go to work on the bus. We are being governed by window-lickers.”

“I suppose that I could go on jumping up and down in the same old rut about motorways, cones and the sad lot of the nation's abused majority, the motorists, but I suppose I've become infected by the classic phlegmatism of the British, and can't be bothered banging on, when I know that neither the Highways Authority nor the Government give a rattling damn, because they know that the 'silent majority' are not called that for nothing. It's minorities that change the world; if you belong to a minority, you're on the pig's back.”

“The Government is pushing us very hard. They are saying ‘you either follow our policy or you don`t get the money’. We are being, in inverted commas, blackmailed.”

“In the last hundred years the car has done more for human freedom, I venture to suggest, than the aeroplane, penicillin, the telephone and the contraceptive pill put together.”

“With this unintended act of open government, the disingenuous attitude of ministers towards public fears about a creeping surveillance state is revealed for all to see.
No wonder Douglas Alexander was keen to tone down these proposals since he must know that public resistance to a road-charging scheme will go through the roof if it is based on technology which poses a threat to personal privacy.
The Government appears to be using the London cameras as a Trojan Horse to secure unprecedented access to information on car drivers' movements without full public scrutiny or debate.”

“This is a bankrupt government of punishment freaks and tax junkies, who see the law-abiding paying public as a lumpen rabble to be persecuted and bled dry — none more so than the poor bloody motorist.
They long ago lost any sense of justice, common sense or proportion..”

“The last good idea to come from Britain was radar!.”

“Australia has become a nanny state, with ridiculous parking and speeding rules.”

“Driving laws should be based on sound science, not the results of opinion polls that were, in any case, subject to the way questions were asked.”