Copyright 1999 Birmingham Post (Great Britain)
"They Can't Have Their Cars and Ban Them"
By Nigel Hastilow
February 11, 1999, Thursday

The Rover 75 could reasonably be described as the company's very own last chance saloon. Pretty soon, they will go on sale at a showroom near you and if you're in the market for a car in the pounds 20,000-pounds 25,000 bracket, do your duty and place an order now.

The success or otherwise of the Rover 75 will determine to a great extent the future of the whole Rover Group. Given the complete mess Rover's BMW masters seem to be making of the business, it's in everyone's interests to wish the Rover 75 every success.

But we're all worried about the future of BMW's Longbridge-too-far, and the devastating effect closure would have on the entire West Midlands, where car -making is still a staple part of the economy.

For every job lost at Longbridge, you can probably add another five going elsewhere among suppliers, suppliers' suppliers and suppliers' suppliers' suppliers.

So why is it that every day we come across Government Ministers, local councillors, environmentalists and other assorted meddlers who demand an end to the "great car economy"?

They want us all to go on the bus, or the train, or by bicycle. They introduce new ways of fining motorists by taxing petrol and car licences way above the rate of inflation.

They tax company cars more and more and they're desperate to start taxing parking spaces and bring in toll roads to make it too expensive for us to drive into city centres.

They refuse to fill in potholes, they make drivers pay for hospital treatment if they have a crash and they have abandoned plans to build more roads.

Instead, they paint stupid white lines on the roads and fine drivers who use these "bus lanes". They install more and more traffic lights. They make the roads narrower. They even allocate space at traffic lights for cyclists, not one of whom has ever been seen waiting in one.

They claim the car is a pollutant. They blame it for everything from asthma to global warming. They ignore the fact that the best way to pollute the atmosphere is to drive a Travel West Midlands bus belching fumes or to be stuck in a queue of early morning traffic waiting for the lights to change.

They seem to think it is feasible, as well as desirable, for people to go by train when the service is plainly getting worse, prices are soaring and those who do risk arriving late for work find they have to stand shoulder-to -shoulder in overcrowded carriages.

Yet these people are among the first to wail and gnash their teeth at the prospect of further job losses in the Midland motor industry. They are among those demanding Government subsidies to bail out ailing companies.

They deplore the lack of alternative sources of employment and lament the disappearance of Britain's manufacturing base, for all the world as if their anti-car policies had absolutely nothing to do with it at all.

As Rover sets about selling the world its new car, and as we brace ourselves for further cost-cutting by one of the most important companies in the region, it is surely time we realised that even the greenest, most politically-correct activist can't have it both ways.

Are they really willing to see the motor industry slide into oblivion or would they like, instead, to try to be a little more constructive by coming up with ways to make driving easier and cheaper rather than more difficult and more expensive?

If they succeeded in pricing everyone but the most wealthy off the roads and onto the buses, they wouldn't have to worry about the threat to the environment because by then we'd all be poverty-stricken and we'd have reverted to living in caves like the loopiest of eco-warriors.

They might not think the car is very pleasant but surely even the greenest activist has to accept it's better than the peasant economy they are in danger of condemning us to.