The Conservatives: the car supremacist’s party

It’s worth remembering that no matter how crap Labour and the Liberal Democrats can be, the Conservatives are always a lot, lot worse.

The Conservatives have always been the party of motoring without restraints. Conservatives hate traffic calming, parking tickets, and speed cameras. Although the Conservative Party has always claimed to be the party of law and order, it has a long tradition of hostility to road traffic law enforcement.

Last year in Swindon the new Conservative council got rid of all the town’s speed cameras, a policy led by councillors with speeding convictions.

The Tories also hate public transport. It was a Conservative government, under a corrupt transport minister named Ernest Marples, who had shares in the road construction industry, which introduced motorways while simultaneously destroying a sophisticated but radically under-funded railway network. Britain’s car dependency owes a great deal to the ideological fanaticism and vested interests of the nasty party.

Here in London, typically

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has questioned the value of bus lanes in central London and voiced opposition to using CCTV equipment to enforce their operation.

“We are sceptical about whether bus lanes make best use of the road space in the narrow carriageway conditions prevalent in central London,” says the borough in response to the mayor’s draft transport strategy.

“We also do not favour the use of CCTV enforcement in principle

And now here in the London Borough of Waltham Forest the Conservatives say that if they gain control of the council they propose

to save £355,000 by getting rid of CCTV vehicles, which enforce traffic regulations.