I wonder how Green Party think they can ban new ICE cars in 2.5 years. And then scrap all the perfectly working 7-8 year old cars in 2035. Doesn’t sound very environmentally friendly to me to scrap tons of working cars…
This is the party that demands clean energy, but then blocks solar developments in areas they control because they think wind power is the future (or it would be if they also didn't oppose offshore wind farms because someone might make a profit on them).
They are also anti-nuclear which is insane. In fact, their environmental policies are probably the worst of everything in their manifesto, and that includes them actually being environmentally friendly.
Honestly the Green party being anti nuclear just proves to me they don’t know what they’re talking about and they get all their information about nuclear from the Simpsons.
Green voters aren't voting green because of their manifesto but because they're named green. It's like having a party called pubs4life who actually want to shut down all the remaining pubs but still getting loads of votes from people because they like the pub and hey, here's a party with pub in the name.
Yeah this is a big problem. They get half of their votes from people who just think ‘green’ are a safe, friendly bunch. They are lunatics. Massive Just Stop Oil brigade vibes from them.
You could say the same for all parties, many people vote Conservative or Labour because they always have, and their Dad did.
But then the content of manifestos are written by a drunk person, whose priorities are likely to change once sober, after the election.
They're absolute loons, quite frankly. Like someone announces building a railway, they then complain that some woodland is going to be knocked down to build it. They live in a fantasy where there are no trade-offs.
The local green councillor to me was objecting to a bus route being curtailed, even as the bus company pointed out that it would be greener if the two people using it drove.
We could have a party take 14 years to build one railway line
Pay eye watering prices for the land
X7 thr construction costs of the rest of Europe
Build less than half of it...then say nah fuck that and not even let it terminate in the capital.
The greens might have some wild ideas but at least they are not the fucking tories
If they had a real chance at power I recon they would look at the monumental scale fuckup of HS2 and say *here, hold my Kombucha…* then proceed to devise some even bigger fuckup
Hs2 so far has cost 66bn
And all we have is a half completed line from brum to London to show for it
You think a politcally party can intelligently be more stupid with public finances?
Hs2 isn't stupid it's requirement to build more capacity into out railways which haven't had major upgrade in 30 years. That was hs1
What was stupid was for the public to think crooks like the tories would make an honest job out of it.
While they've also postponed the closure of their giant open cast lignite mines, so threatening more villages and the 10% that remains of Hambach Forest.
Yes this was in Derby. They banned the development of new solar farms in uninhabited areas, to focus on off shore renewable energy…From Derby… a fucking landlocked county.
They also have jihadists out on the podiums
The greens going for the sledgehammer approach isn’t at all surprising
I love breathing cleaner air like many people (I’m still quite young and can still remember when city centres absolutely stunk of diesel) but you can’t just blanket ban everything fossil fuelled at once and call it a day.
I've lived in and around cities for 40 odd years and buses were and still are the worst culprits for smells. It is slightly better now, which means I now get to breath in all the vile smelling vapes that are every 3 feet without the hindrance of the occasional exhaust.
My old flat was right next to a bus stop. I had to close my window whenever one pulled up as the fumes were awful. Buses, taxis and vans were the biggest culprits. I had to leave that flat, which I loved otherwise, as the pollution gave me an asthma attack.
Indeed. But even as late as the early 2000s buses really stunk. Kicking out clouds of black smoke as they moved. Nowadays a lot are hybrids and some are even full electric. Without an abundance of clean energy hybrids and electric vehicles just move where the pollution occurs, but it’s still a vast improvement because the densely populated areas no longer stink to high heaven.
They don’t.
1) they know they can’t win, so do t need a plan that can actually be inplemented
2) they don’t include hybrid cars in ice. There are shit-loads of hybrids out there
It is easy to make "promises" you know you will never have to deliver on in any way shape or form. They also want to extend 20mph zones which are terrible environmentally and have no statistical benefit safety wise.
Even faced with a conservative rout green don't stand to win many seats. Green effectively exist to offer a place for voters to register that they want the bigger parties to do more for the environment.
Labour are the most likely to have to act on their policies so they have outlined a very boring safe agenda (not just regarding motoring) that way they are not paying out rope to hang themselves with come next election cycle since they already face an uphill battle inheriting the current crisis.
The conservatives are swinging wildly and for the fences with a mix of policies trying to keep voter at the far right from defecting to reform and while not upsetting the moderate base so that they mitigate some of the bleeding.
Labour are the only party that will have to even try to make good on these promises.
Everyone else can promise whatever they want as national policy in bad faith to hyper target specific areas they may gain or keep.
Yeah like that activity makes me not want to vote for them.
They are effectively putting me off the road, costing me my job etc
Are they gonna build me a house where I can't charge one? Give me an ev?
Rename them the Communist party. Then re-read their proposals and it'll make more sense.
Green party is not about environmentalism. It's about using "green" as a disguise for the real intentions of the party.
Every political manifesto should have to come with a disclaimer of "there's no legal requirement to do any of this and no penalty for not achieveing it".
Every manifesto is just a list they come up with that they think will grab the most votes from the areas they're targeting. They won't actually deliver any of it, and the stuff they attempt, they'll just let private companies come in to make a load of money and a massive mess, then fuck off and leave the rest to the taxpayer.
Actually, that's only about convention. They could vote against a law anyway. And they can't indefinitely block a law being passed. Not since the Parliament Act of 1911 and 1949.
The conservatives promising billions to fix potholes as if potholes haven't increased exponentially while they have been in power for the last decade and half. Ironic.
Most of us being drivers know first hand what 14 years of Tory rule has done to our roads. Their claim that they will spend any serious lolly on roads is fucking laughable.
2024
**"Conservatives** - £8.3B to fix potholes."
2019
**"Conservatives** - £2B for the biggest ever pothole-filling programme.
We're going to fix potholes so that your local roads are safer."
[https://x.com/Conservatives/status/1198622047934414849](https://x.com/Conservatives/status/1198622047934414849)
COVID cost a *fortune*, and there’s been no money in council road budgets since Eric Pickles (remember him?) brutalised them in 2011. The only way new road surfacing takes place at scale is via local authorities being able to set local taxes on house values. Which might be about to happen…
>set local taxes on house values
Good luck implementing that - many years ago, there was a proposed council tax revaluation, and even though it would have been cost neutral, the media were incensed that people living in areas that had gentrified since 1991 would have to pay significantly more - especially the elderly, on fixed incomes, living in bigger properties etc - so the revaluation was cancelled.
The media also like to moan about ever increasing council tax and ever decreasing local services - deliberately making it seem as though one pays for the other, while omitting that the bulk of local authority funding is via central government grants.
"If you vote for us one more time we pinky promise to fix all the shit we broke!"
They didn't you fix it before, why would they bother next time, especially when they know from experience they can just lie and idiots will still vote for them?
When considering your vote, remember the conservative manifesto was written when they were 20 points down in the polls. They know they're not going to get into power so they can effectively write what they like
Nonetheless, good write up OP
They write what they like anyway. Even when they win they don't do most of what they said they would.
Exhibit a
BBC News - Conservative Party manifesto 2019: 13 key policies explained
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50524262
Thanks.
I spent a bit of time on it and I think I've spotted everything that's directly relevant to drivers, but of course I may have missed something.
It's remarkable that there's 50 million drivers in the UK and among all those hundreds of pages of manifestos, this is all they could come up with for us.
Most people who drive don't identify as "drivers". A large proportion who hold a driving license spend very little time on the roads, mainly drive locally and see the whole thing as a bit of an inconvenience. Committed drivers is a relatively small constituency.
Also the reason our roads, and the country in general, is in a shit state is because of 14 years of Tories in power. If you love pot holes, vote Conservative.
Trying to stay a-political. But yes, 14 years of austerity has done this. Not that labour is offering much different, but still they're doing just enough
The Green's manifesto is legitimate nightmare scenario shit. Not a single normal person has been involved in its creation.
The Conservatives is the best, specifically for drivers, but:
A. They're not going to win
B. Even if they did, fuck off they'll actually do any of it. Lying bastards.
The only one that matters is Labour's - and it's alright. Covers (what I think are) the most important points, but not very ambitious.
Which, considering the state of *everything* is to be expected.
Aye, that's basically their entire pitch.
"We're the only ones who can be trusted to fix what **we've** broken"
Without even a hint of irony or self-awareness
As a seasoned shit poster I'm sure he's ok with it.
Just highlighting the bizarre dissonance in his arguments. Allegedly a green supporter who drives a V10 Audi, and is logic based but cannot extrapolate the logic that everyone arbitrarily deciding to park across 2 spaces halves the capacity of any given car park. Also claims to be socially responsible but can't understand the social irresponsibility of selfish behaviour....
Very weird.
And they’ve had the last 14 years to do all those things in, which they haven’t. But trust us, we promise this time we will do it, please, one last chance?
The Conservatives are desperately throwing populist shit at their dwindling supply of middle aged and elderly voters to see what sticks, in the hope it might fend off Reform.
-They've been promising investment in northern infrastructure for the past 14 years. they recently scrapped the northern leg on the only major infrastructure project they actually managed to start (if you exclude the very iffy freeports).
-They've already lost their court challenge on ULEZ, they may as well announce they're renaming Norway, they have equally little power to do it.
-The rest either requires a trip to the magic money tree, or is stuff they could have done at any time in the last 14 years.
I think the lib dems actually strike the best balance of progressive and achievable, but labour are also pretty reasonable (if a bit uninspiring).
Edit: with regards to the Greens - everyone including them know that they're not going to get anywhere near power. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing having a few idealist voices in the mix challenging convention.
>(if a bit uninspiring)
I think people seriously underestimate the monetary value of political stability. I work in major engineering projects, and the taxpayer cost of the constant policy implosions, u-turns and panic has been measured in the fucking billions. Same for the private sector. Folk can adapt to the prevailing business environment, it's the complete unpredictability that's killer.
It's massively expensive for government to constantly change its mind. Sticking with an imperfect policy is usually much better than multiple successive changes.
You even have situations like Belgium being unable to form a government, or the US government shutdowns, and nothing bad happens. Public services continue to operate, there's just no new policies or laws. I genuinely think we'd have been better of with 14 years of hung parliament rather than the actively destructive government we got.
So as much as I'd like some bold, radical policies, I think a government that can simply hold its nerve for more than five minutes will be a major improvement and cost saving.
The summary above has cut out some important things from the conservative manifesto. The £8.3B is to be borrowed from future years budgets to repair roads this/next year.
Not to mention, it's the conservatives. That £8.3B is only going into their back yard, and then the roads they use for commute. Anywhere outside of London won't see any of that funding
The manifesto states it's funded from the cancellation of HS2.
The total figure is probably for life of the next parliament rather than an annual figure, if that's what you mean.
Problem is they’ve already done it so why is it in the manifesto?!
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/revealed-the-roads-being-resurfaced-in-your-area-thanks-to-reallocated-hs2-funding#:~:text=The%20reallocated%20HS2%20funding%20is,situation%20could%20be%20even%20worse.
>The Conservatives is the best, specifically for drivers, but:
>A. They're not going to win
>B. Even if they did, fuck off they'll actually do any of it. Lying bastards.
How can the Tories present themselves as on the side of the drivers. They introduced the 'luxury tax' on cars over 40k. This resulted in a large payment on purchase and increased tax for 5 years. Not small amounts of money. Now the average price of a new car sold in the uk is over 39k so a hell of a lot if new cars are subject to their increased taxation.
I'm reminded of their pledge to recruit an additional 20k police officers... conveniently ignoring that at least 20k police officer posts were cut during the "austerity" years...
The tories can promise anything - they know they aren't going to win, so won't have to actually do any of it. Labour should ask them why they didn't do any of it in their last budget just a few months ago.
For clarity, Labour and Lib Dems have said they'll move the ban back to its original date of 2030, meaning it will arrive sooner than the current (recently delayed) date of 2035.
It'll effectively happen then anyway, since it's eu wide and companies won't be extending production just for UK vehicles. I suppose extending the deadline might let some weird homologated imports from us or somewhere in, but not to any significant degree.
Eu rule is an effective ban in 2035.
UK has a ZEV mandate in place that says you must sell 80% EV by 2030 regardless, the 2030-2035 argument will only impact high end high margin cars like large SUVs and V8 cars - it won't save the hot hatch or accessible performance vehicles.
As a former resident of a ‘northern powerhouse’ area that was promised the moon by Osborne, Johnson and the rest, and subsequently received actual fuck all and actually had its (nationally distributed) transport budgets slashed and major infrastructure projects cancelled by Westminster, the Tories can fuck the fuck off to the far side of fuck, and then fuck off some more.
Since Thatcher the whole party has turned into one giant boomer-nip grift, overseeing the wholesale transfer of wealth to the mega-rich while claiming to be on the side of the working person. Absolute shysters.
Actually funding HS2 and massively increasing freight rail and bringing back local rail hubs would help massively. Best way to reduce potholes is to get as many heavy goods vehicles off of the road as possible.
My family runs a haulage company, so you’d assume it’d be in my interest for rail freight to stay irrelevant, but this country could really benefit from it. The problem is though, the logistics and pricing model for rail freight is so wanky that trucks just make sense for 95% (a figurative number I pulled from my ass btw not a real stat) of companies to use trucks instead.
If we still had a nationalised rail system, it would be far easier to implement, and if we had way more rail lines connecting more places without having to go via other routes in the wrong direction to then switch lines to get in the right direction, and if most/all rail stations had freight yards with facilities for crane loading containers, hoppers/belts to unload bulker trucks carrying grain/coal/raw material etc, it would be GREAT and actually viable. But we have none of that, and it would be so costly to implement that it’d make HS2 look like a bargain.
Also, the pricing model for rail freight makes it super unattractive and unreliable for businesses to use it over trucks for transporting their goods, because if one load scheduled for the train gets cancelled, the GBRf then increases the price for the rest of the customers to offset the lost revenue, and it’s quite common for loads to be cancelled as all it would take is for I don’t know let’s say, a farm had their combine harvester break down so their wheat harvest was delayed mid way through it, or a factories production run didn’t meet its quota for an array of different reasons, or a print centre had a printer break down so their daily scheduled print got held up till the next day (super, SUPER common), that load isn’t getting sent until they have enough to send a full load to make it actually cost effective.
So then let’s say all these companies were planning to use rail to transport their goods, their quotes for transport costs are forever changing and getting more expensive whenever one of many businesses using that train, has to cancel.
The other issue which I already touched on is then that there isn’t proper unloading facilities at all/most rail stations, so let’s say this farm in norfolk wanted to ship their 80 tonnes of barley to a giant brewery up north, well they’d need 3 trucks to take that barley to the nearest train station with a freight loading terminal, and then on the other side, there needs to be a freight loading/unloading station semi close by to the brewery for another 3 wagons to take the 80 tonnes of barley off the train to the brewery. Now I have no stats for this but I get trains very frequently and I know that atleast on the east coast lines and the local stations around norfolk, hardly any of them have proper rail freight loading/unloading facilities to make this a genuinely viable solution, you’d instead have to have the 3 trucks drive 100 miles to the nearest rail freight terminal, to have this grain than shipped way past the brewery on the other side, then needing 3 trucks to go another 100 miles to get to the brewery. Too much going in the wrong direction to get to the nearest freight terminal, would take longer overall straining the supply chain even more, and it then gets even more complicated for companies to ship their produce because now they’re having to deal with 3 transport companies instead of 1 (the trucks to take it to the station, the rail freight company, and the 3 trucks on the other end). It then gets far more confusing when traffic offices in different companies are trying to ring up chasing where their load is and they’re coordinating between 3 companies instead of 1 who takes it all the way from supplier to receiver, so even if rail freight was improved and worked to be slightly cheaper, a lot of companies would still opt for trucks because with the current structure for how rail freight is, the headache clusterfuck for organising timely transport is already hard as it is, and it would get a lot harder switching to rail, and there’s more margin for error/points of failure. Lastly, even if hundreds of billions was spent on building proper rail freight infrastructure at every station in the country or even just most stations, time is the other issue. If you have a freight train going from Harwich docks, all the way up to Edinburgh, but at every station it passes, it has to stop to unload and load up, because more businesses are now able to transport their goods on it, the time it takes for let’s say, a container coming out of the harwich port, to get up to a distribution centre near Edinburgh now takes 2 or 3 days instead of 1 day, which means a lot of people aren’t getting their stuff on time, a load of businesses can’t start their manufacturing runs until later, and the whole “Just in Time” freight logistics model of only ordering stuff in as and when they need it and running their operations on expecting their goods to come in quickly, it then needs to be restructured to accommodate their goods now taking a few days to get there instead of 1 so companies nationwide would then be changing their operations and consumers would have to get used to not expecting everything to be available almost instantly at their fingertips, next day shipping/delivery would be a thing of the past and everyone would moan.
TLDR: Unless hundreds of billions was spent on completely overhauling the rail freight system/structure, it will continue to be inferior to road freight in terms of costing, reliability, speed and ease of use.
Ask yourself how much of what the Conservatives are promising matches what they've done in the past 14 years. Now they're promising to fix potholes. Have they been doing it for 14 years? No, they haven't.
"No new 20MPH or low traffic neighbourhood zones without local referendums."
A local referendum over a street being made 20mph or not? They did a residential street near me. Seemed like a good idea. No-one should be hitting 20mph on that little road unless they're flooring it. Do we really need a vote on it?
"Pumpwatch scheme to force petrol retailers to share live prices."
There are apps for this already. Why does the government need to spend money on it?
"Proposed reforms to penalise overrunning roadworks and "implement consistent approach" to yellow box enforcement."
Why wasn't this done in the past 14 years.
> A local referendum over a street being made 20mph or not? They did a residential street near me. Seemed like a good idea. No-one should be hitting 20mph on that little road unless they're flooring it. Do we really need a vote on it?
Been shown this week that it [makes a huge improvement for safety too](https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/09/vehicle-damage-claims-wales-fall-20mph-speed-limit)
Same as with the Rwanda bill if they really wanted to.
With heavy handed legislation which courts cannot overrule.
Regardless of what happens in Rwanda, every person or organisation involved in asylum claims etc. must now consider Rwanda as a safe country. The next section also forbids any court or tribunal from hearing legal challenges that it isn't safe...
Haven't had a chance to look at each report....but thanks for the overview....
It's interesting to see the spending the conservatives are committing to spend on roads/transport, whilst pledging to also cut taxes.
Makes me think that they will be making further cuts to other areas where the money is equally needed.
Bear in mind that the goverment's total spend each year is about 1,200B (1.2 trillion)
They actually say they'll spend £36B total on roads, rail, buses etc but this is all the spend I could find that was only for cars/roads.
> Makes me think that they will be making further cuts to other areas where the money is equally needed
Benefits payments are going to be reduced to pay for a big chunk of stuff. Worth remembering that a huge percentage of benefits are paid to in-work adults, so reducing this will lead to further unnecessary poverty
Make them walkable. Fine.
Connect them to public transport so people can get out of the estate without needing a road. Fin - oh, nevermind, the railway line isn't getting built because it might knock down *one* tree and the Greens can't have that.
Uhhhhh
Well, hope you like walking 2.5km to the nearest road.
> Connect them to public transport so people can get out of the estate without needing a road. Fin - oh, nevermind, the railway line isn't getting built because it might knock down one tree and the Greens can't have that.
It's this shit that puts me off the greens, and a lot of the groups associated with them.
There are trade-offs for everything. One of the trade-offs for living in a modern industrialised nation is that you'll need new things sometimes and those new things will be built in places that used to be fields and forests. You either accept that, yes, there will be some loss of forests and/or fields, or you don't get the shit you keep banging on about wanting.
They're not even NIMBY's, they're "BANANAs" - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. Literally any kind of housing, infrastructure or transport scheme gets objected to because it might impact some natural feature or other, with the ultimate result that nothing gets built at all. See also: HS2.
One of the best hopes for a Starmer government (and there are precious few of those) is that he's promising to completely rip up our shit planning laws, so we can actually get some of the improvements the Greens always say they want without those same Greens tying every single one of them up in red tape.
Good. That's the correct view. Nuclear is a necessary baseline, renewables will top it up.
I couldnt help but actually get angry at their manifesto when I read their thing about nuclear. Everything they said about it was a provable lie. Mind you... I might be a bit biased being a nuclear researcher.
Most of the time Greens are blinkered to their own little world, just like those on the other far side.
Nuclear in the UK makes so much sense, we're fairly seismically stable, coasts are fairly calm and we have huge areas with the required water and land. with the pushes to move to BEVs, Nuclear is pretty much required to accommodate the needed power.
I don't work in energy or anything nuclear
Good info but I’ll believe it when I see it, from any party.
On my wishlist (as someone who doesn’t have an EV yet), would be a commitment from the government to incentivise employers and car park owners to rig up their places with chargers. And remove red tape so they can get them onto on street parking etc. Will never happen tho
There needs to be a push for workplace charging.. my business has an arm that installs them so we’ve been going around putting them into our offices (all of which are leased). Most landlords have been fine with it, they see the benefits of it as and when we move on, etc.
One office, however, has landlords as greedy and avaricious as you can imagine. The cost to install new circuits and the chargers is about £10-20k, depending on whether it’s 2 or 4 of them, and the complexity. The landlords wanted an “approval fee” of £4,000.
PER CHARGING POINT.
Additionally, as well as charging us for the electricity used, they wanted all the revenue from the chargers (they’re accessible to members of the public so can generate income).
They effectively wanted us to pay for it all, pay them an equivalent cost on top for the privilege, and then give them any additional money on top.
And they wonder why people are leaving their offices in droves.
Always makes me laugh seeing the Tories promise the world in the manifesto like they haven't just had 14 years to implement these changes. I'm not tribal to any party, but the current lot are arseholes.
Not saying the other parties are any better, but fuck me - the arrogance.
See page 4 of the [extraordinary funding letter from the Department for Transport and TfL](https://content.tfl.gov.uk/extraordinary-funding-and-financing-agreement-may-2020.pdf) dated May 2020:
> TfL agrees to [...] The immediate reintroduction of the London Congestion Charge, LEZ and ULEZ and urgently bring forward proposals to widen the scope and levels of these charges, in accordance with the relevant legal powers and decision-making processes.
It couldn't be more clear - "widen the scope and levels of these charges"
The order comes from above your air must be atleast this clean to be fit for human consumption, which we mostly blow through the limit of anyway. But then the local authority is forced to take some form of action to look like pollution is going to go down. Manchester I think is trying to do it by buying electric buses and slapping cycle lanes everywhere but that's expensive. For the intensity of the problem and the lack of funding from government the only thing London could do was a clean air zone. Anything else they go bankrupt and do nothing they get fined by the government and go bankrupt.
This is a genuine question, not trying to be snarky, but how? And do you have any links for it?
I'm not saying you're wrong or lying; it's just this has been such a plank of partisan fighting over the last few years that if the Tories did force this then it's one of the most brazen things I've seen in politics for a very long time.
> Ministers have been accused of hypocrisy in claiming Sadiq Khan expanded London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) to raise revenue after it emerged the Department for Transport urged the mayor to extend the city’s congestion charge for the same reason.
[Source](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/29/tories-accused-hypocrisy-ulez-row-call-extend-congestion-charge)
Interesting.
What I've taken from that article isn't so much that they forced it on him but that they made demands very similar those Khan implemented then went on to castigate him for imposing something fundamentally of the same nature.
Either way, rank hypocrisy even if my slightly different reading of it is accurate.
Greens - ban on construction of new roads? There's been a notable uptick in traffic this year. We need more infrastructure for the future and that includes more roads. Public transport is not sufficient enough for us living in the real world and the price disparity in housing and wages between the south of England and everywhere else means that more people are commuting longer distances to work than before.
Building more roads doesn't reduce traffic. Ideally we need integrated public transport options and things like safe cycle ways to encourage fewer car journeys and better use of the roads we have.
Fixing potholes is a task that local government is responsible for. UK Government has slashed local government funding since 2010 and forced them to prioritise adult social care, which is why councils can't afford to fix the roads.
Do we want more of the same (Conservatives) or do we want change?
The Greens are never going to come into power. So they know that they're never going to implement these policies. They're benchmarks for where they want to be, that they can hopefully use to help nudge the parties who end up in power by showing them that there's appetite for more green policy.
I'm normally with the green party, but that reeks of London centric thinking, that we just use public transport or walk. Which is fine in big cities, less so in smaller towns or the countryside.
Car emissions are not really the problem either, it makes up for a small amount of global emissions, and is a way to pass the blame onto the public rather than tackle the small number of corporations that are producing over 80% of emissions
It's completely dumb. Who's going to pay for my car to be replaced when they ban it? Presumably me. What will be the effect on the economy of millions of people having to save a huge portion of their income to buy a new car?
They know they're not getting in so they can chat any old shite but they should at least try. This makes me think they're actually stupid.
Yup...
Workable if I worked in the city...
For my current workplace though? Public transport is out of the question. A 15 minute drive becomes over an hour by bus, public transport doesn't run early enough either.
Cycling isn't practical, it's a good 45-ish minutes away. So I'm losing 1 hour on commute times, another 10-15 minutes to get changed before/after work, another 10-15 minutes on top of that to account for varying performance levels, another hour lost as I'd have to get up earlier (thus sleep earlier).
You're talking as much as 2.5 hours a day lost by cycling to work for me personally. I can earn more money, I can't earn more time... And once you attach a cost to that time, it actually works out cheaper to run the car anyway.
>that reeks of London centric
I think that's the point. They're, at best, hoping for a handful of MPs and they'll never come from rural communities. Their best chances are London, Brighton, Bristol etc and maybe some home counties.
Roads got like this under the tories but they’ll so fix them if you vote for them this time, honest. Fucking bollocks. Shame Greens aims are so ridiculously unachievable, like obviously if you have your head screwed on we are living during s climate crisis and a tipping point, realistically we do need to just stop right this second but it that isn’t actually implementable. They’d would just end up pushing it back like the rest.
Some bits from Greens that OP decided to leave out, but conveniently not for the tories.
Increase annual public subsidies for rail and bus travel to £10bn by the end of the next Parliament, with free bus travel for under-18s.
Invest in an additional £19bn over five years to improve public transport, support electrification and create new cycleways and footpaths.
Bring the railways back into public ownership.
Give local authorities control over and funding for improved bus services.
Only the Labour manifesto matters at the point. The others are just wish casting.
And Starmer has a history of going back on pledges. So…
Reform should really go all in and promise to ban all private parking enforcement 😈
Of all those Id say Conservatives are the best. on paper of course.
I didnt know about the A27 bypass at Arundel. I have to go that way sometimes and it would be big improvement, but not as bad as all of the roundabouts around Chichester. Its not even the biggest hold up from where I am. The first 6 miles can take up to an hour in rush hour.
Makes me laugh that parties think that moving the ZEV mandate back to 2030 is going to make a huge difference lol
All it will do is kill the car buying sector quicker than the current 2035 deadline
The current rules state you have to sell 80% EV by 2030 anyway. And that ramps up year on year to 100% by 2035. (2031 - 84%, 2032 - 88%, 2033 - 92%, 2024 - 96%)
The remaining 20% from 2030 was originally supposed to be vehicles of "significant zero emissions capability", but what that actually meant was never defined.
So instead of defining it they just left it at ICE.
Anyone who thinks the change in 2030 wording will make any difference to the cars that the regular punter will actually be able to buy is in for a shock. Large SUVs, and the occasional top of the line performance car will be left with engines, that's about it.
VW group will prioritise Porsches, Lambos, and high end Audis, not Octavias and Golfs. Stellantis will leave a few Maseratis and top end Alfas. Toyota will have Land Cruisers. JLR will prioritise full fat Range Rovers.
The fine for OEMs not meeting those targets are £15k / EV not delivered. So if in 2032 you sell 100k cars in the UK, but only 80% of them are EVs vs the 88% target, you've missed by 8k EVs, and will be fined £120M.
This is why the head of Ford Europe recently said that Ford will just prioritise volume to other markets outside of the UK - the risk of penalty for missing targets is too big.
All of this is already in place today, and was a flagship piece of legislation of the Boris government.
This year's target is 22%, which the industry as a whole hits, but a big chunk of that is Tesla. So OEMs can try to overcompensate in the coming years for missing this year's target, or they can hand their money to the world's richest man's EV company.
The green are mental
.
Reform prefer Gas cars right ? Zyklon B gas I assume
Fixing a million potholes is meaningless it should be miles of road but I assume they’ve figured out people are stupid and like big numbers
Fuck the tories
Note "**Fixing** a million **potholes**"
As opposed to resurfacing... Even if they were going to follow through with the promise, it'd be the usual stuff and stamp bodge job that lasts about 4 days.
They will wait until everyone has an ev and they’ll just remotely fine you if you go over the speed limit - make no mistake, we’ll all be effectively on a control grid by 2040
It's entirely possible that none of the above could happen, but I find it interesting that the cost of car insurance comes up in the manifestos of both the main parties. It's clearly an issue that's cutting through enough for them to be talking about it.
Greens aren't serious people, let alone a serious party. Imagine thinking that banning perfectly serviceable ICE cars is good for the environment on balance. No thought to investing in synthetic fuels etc.
You've neglected to list anything relating to public transport, that's a huge boon for drivers.
Cutting out unnecessary journeys helps those who are making necessary ones.
Even as a medium hardcore petrolhead, I think the Reform stance on this is insane. Yes, it'd be lovely if we could all drive huge v8s without having to worry about the environment, but it's kinda despicable to fuck the planet over to try to net more votes from climate change denying idiots. I like the ulez retraction and blocking more of the idiotic 20mph limits, but no way in hell am I voting conservative. I don't think it's good to have any party in power too long, and they've definitely outstayed their welcome
I'm an EV enthusiast but it's obvious there is absolutely fuck all chance of the ICE ban happening in 2030 or even 2035 unless we do two things.
1. Give Chinese automakers complete freedom to sell their cars here tariff and tax free.
2. Install hundreds of thousands of destination chargers in every car park that cost under 20p a kwh
Neither of these things have the slightest chance of happening so we'll just be sat here in 2035 like Ned Flanders' parents.
I would have liked to see some kind of standardisation and enforced interoperability of the charging network.
It’s absolute chaos at the moment. We should be able to pay for any charger on any app and not spend ten minutes working out how to use it or trying to find the charger ID.
If we are phasing out ICE we need a ground up rethink of how we charge their replacements.
The greens are just absolutely mindless and don’t actually seem like a very Green Party. The rest of the parties seem to have pretty decent manifestos minus maybe reform
2024
**"Conservatives** - £8.3B to fix potholes."
2019
**"Conservatives** - £2B for the biggest ever pothole-filling programme.
We're going to fix potholes so that your local roads are safer."
[https://x.com/Conservatives/status/1198622047934414849](https://x.com/Conservatives/status/1198622047934414849)
What they should be doing "for drivers" - what you should want them to do - is understand Induced Demand which has been known since the 1930s. More roads, more lanes, makes people drive more, which makes traffic *worse*.
Improve lives for drivers by *giving people viable alternatives to driving* - buses, trains, walking, biking, trams, working from home, ride sharing - so people who don't want to drive get out of their cars and leave the roads clearer and safer for people who need to drive, or want to drive.
Reliable, affordable, convenient, alternatives to driving; make freight travel on trains instead of lorries. Then the people who need to drive, and the people who want to invest thousands of their own money to drive by choice, get much better driving conditions - clearer roads, no cyclists on the roads, no road rage from people who don't want to be there, no drivers who are elderly and unsafe but have no alternatives - and the tax burden of building and maintaining all the roads goes down because there's fewer roads.
It doesn't really matter because they won't see much power at all. They're appealing to climate alarmists whose entire personalities hinge on "saving the planet".
They're all selected, not elected. None of it matters anyway. They give false impression that the people have a say.
Electrification of the road network is coming whether we like it or not. Being able to disable access to vehicles remotely for individuals, as well as having full tracking abilities is just too good to pass up for those who wish to control you.
Watch this space.
Green and Reform are equally as bonkers on either ends of the scale.
Labour and Lib Dems are the most sensible.
If you believe the tories will actually use money for what they say they will, you are an idiot and I have some snake oil to sell you.
The conservatives have had over 10yrs to all that stuff & didn't so I don't trust them as far as I could chuck them lol not saying I trust labour more I don't
As a driver I’d love an LTN on my road - makes it easier to park, eliminates people using my road as a shortcut, stops people having takeaways and dumping the refuse out of the window and virtually eliminates fly tipping.
Do the Tories want to ban councils setting 20mph speed limits without a referendum? That’s insane. I’m vaguely planning to vote Green based on their social policies but their environmental policies make it quite difficult. I like the policy of expanding 20 zones but no new road building (including bypass roads for built up areas?) is nuts, especially when they also oppose rail construction.
I think all manifestos are bulls#it, but why forget to add £20K tax free allowance to Reform manifesto? Think if that is brought in, all taxpayers will benefit from it and it may encourage more scroungers to work, good in my book. I must say, no all claiments are scroungers, but there seem to be more than ever!
The Greens have such a sensible policy 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️ luckily they’re too radical and un pragmatic to ever get anywhere close to power, same for Reform.
None of them, whoever wins power is going to do what they say anyway.
Load of self serving,lying twats no matter what colour their tie is, wether it’s no Sky Rishi or legohead Starmer all drivers are going to get taxed more, road pricing is probably going to be back on the table.
Hopefully whoever’s in charge gets told to get fucked just like they did last time they thought about it.
Glad insurance is mentioned in labour, it's ridiculous.
I do wish they would push for roadworks and road closures to be better managed also, give contracts to companies who are actually good not just cheap. Too many times you see signs up for 3 weeks closing off lanes, work being done so slowly, then another 2 weeks of lanes closed only for it to one day be "open"...
Anyone in Notts near the train station with the new builds knows what I mean. Infuriating.
The only good thing the Tories have done is - fuel duty has been frozen since 2011 and temporary cut by 5p in 2022. If they hadn’t done this - fuel would be what - 30p more per litre than now.
Of course - they introduced the escalator in the 90s so….
I thought EV batteries won’t last more than 8-10 years and the waste of old batteries + lithium mining is poluting as much as a petrol car does in 500.000 miles or so, i’ve seen a study about it, not sure how real it is and if they took into account oil changes twice a year.
I don’t get why all the parties are so obsessed with EVs. Surely they can start by replacing polyester fiber with cotton or bamboo and find alternatives to single use plastic, that would really make a difference.
I wonder how Green Party think they can ban new ICE cars in 2.5 years. And then scrap all the perfectly working 7-8 year old cars in 2035. Doesn’t sound very environmentally friendly to me to scrap tons of working cars…
This is the party that demands clean energy, but then blocks solar developments in areas they control because they think wind power is the future (or it would be if they also didn't oppose offshore wind farms because someone might make a profit on them).
They are also anti-nuclear which is insane. In fact, their environmental policies are probably the worst of everything in their manifesto, and that includes them actually being environmentally friendly.
Honestly the Green party being anti nuclear just proves to me they don’t know what they’re talking about and they get all their information about nuclear from the Simpsons.
Green voters aren't voting green because of their manifesto but because they're named green. It's like having a party called pubs4life who actually want to shut down all the remaining pubs but still getting loads of votes from people because they like the pub and hey, here's a party with pub in the name.
Yeah this is a big problem. They get half of their votes from people who just think ‘green’ are a safe, friendly bunch. They are lunatics. Massive Just Stop Oil brigade vibes from them.
You could say the same for all parties, many people vote Conservative or Labour because they always have, and their Dad did. But then the content of manifestos are written by a drunk person, whose priorities are likely to change once sober, after the election.
Accurate.
The greens are more populist than the Tories
It’s ‘nucular’.
They're absolute loons, quite frankly. Like someone announces building a railway, they then complain that some woodland is going to be knocked down to build it. They live in a fantasy where there are no trade-offs. The local green councillor to me was objecting to a bus route being curtailed, even as the bus company pointed out that it would be greener if the two people using it drove.
We could have a party take 14 years to build one railway line Pay eye watering prices for the land X7 thr construction costs of the rest of Europe Build less than half of it...then say nah fuck that and not even let it terminate in the capital. The greens might have some wild ideas but at least they are not the fucking tories
If they had a real chance at power I recon they would look at the monumental scale fuckup of HS2 and say *here, hold my Kombucha…* then proceed to devise some even bigger fuckup
However stupid I think HS2 and the Conservatives are, the Greens are madder. Absolutely box of frogs mad.
Hs2 so far has cost 66bn And all we have is a half completed line from brum to London to show for it You think a politcally party can intelligently be more stupid with public finances? Hs2 isn't stupid it's requirement to build more capacity into out railways which haven't had major upgrade in 30 years. That was hs1 What was stupid was for the public to think crooks like the tories would make an honest job out of it.
> it would be greener if the two people using it drove what about if 30 other people used it instead of driving?
If you get 30 people on a bus, it's greener. But there are buses and trains that hardly anyone uses.
Their anti nuclear justification is based on lies too. Source: im a nuclear researcher. Greens are a joke.
> They are also anti-nuclear which is insane. Green parties in Germany were funded by Russia. And now Germany depends too much on Russian gas.
While they've also postponed the closure of their giant open cast lignite mines, so threatening more villages and the 10% that remains of Hambach Forest.
Yes this was in Derby. They banned the development of new solar farms in uninhabited areas, to focus on off shore renewable energy…From Derby… a fucking landlocked county. They also have jihadists out on the podiums
I agree. Don’t forget before the Ukraine conflict, energy prices were increasing due to “lack of wind” that year.
Short answer is: they don't. They know there's no hope of them leading the country
This is exactly it they can say anything they want same with Lib Dem or any other party than the main two… who just don’t do any of it anyway
The greens going for the sledgehammer approach isn’t at all surprising I love breathing cleaner air like many people (I’m still quite young and can still remember when city centres absolutely stunk of diesel) but you can’t just blanket ban everything fossil fuelled at once and call it a day.
So are reform but in the other way. As much as I love to rev my car with my aftermarket exhaust, even I accept the ICE is not forever.
Reform doesn’t surprise me at all… I’d hoped the greens would be a bit more pragmatic than simply what boils down to “CAR BAD”
I've lived in and around cities for 40 odd years and buses were and still are the worst culprits for smells. It is slightly better now, which means I now get to breath in all the vile smelling vapes that are every 3 feet without the hindrance of the occasional exhaust.
My old flat was right next to a bus stop. I had to close my window whenever one pulled up as the fumes were awful. Buses, taxis and vans were the biggest culprits. I had to leave that flat, which I loved otherwise, as the pollution gave me an asthma attack.
Indeed. But even as late as the early 2000s buses really stunk. Kicking out clouds of black smoke as they moved. Nowadays a lot are hybrids and some are even full electric. Without an abundance of clean energy hybrids and electric vehicles just move where the pollution occurs, but it’s still a vast improvement because the densely populated areas no longer stink to high heaven.
They don’t. 1) they know they can’t win, so do t need a plan that can actually be inplemented 2) they don’t include hybrid cars in ice. There are shit-loads of hybrids out there
They have absolutely zero credibility.
[удалено]
It is easy to make "promises" you know you will never have to deliver on in any way shape or form. They also want to extend 20mph zones which are terrible environmentally and have no statistical benefit safety wise. Even faced with a conservative rout green don't stand to win many seats. Green effectively exist to offer a place for voters to register that they want the bigger parties to do more for the environment. Labour are the most likely to have to act on their policies so they have outlined a very boring safe agenda (not just regarding motoring) that way they are not paying out rope to hang themselves with come next election cycle since they already face an uphill battle inheriting the current crisis. The conservatives are swinging wildly and for the fences with a mix of policies trying to keep voter at the far right from defecting to reform and while not upsetting the moderate base so that they mitigate some of the bleeding.
Labour are the only party that will have to even try to make good on these promises. Everyone else can promise whatever they want as national policy in bad faith to hyper target specific areas they may gain or keep.
Because you can promise whatever you want if your not going to have to delvier any of it.
Yeah like that activity makes me not want to vote for them. They are effectively putting me off the road, costing me my job etc Are they gonna build me a house where I can't charge one? Give me an ev?
Yup madness isn’t it and not green at all!
Rename them the Communist party. Then re-read their proposals and it'll make more sense. Green party is not about environmentalism. It's about using "green" as a disguise for the real intentions of the party.
AHAHAHAHAHA. god. why do anti-communists label anything vaguely left-leaning as “communist”? it’s so funny
communism is when you ban ICE engines, the faster you ban them the more communist you are - Karl Marx
Every political manifesto should have to come with a disclaimer of "there's no legal requirement to do any of this and no penalty for not achieveing it". Every manifesto is just a list they come up with that they think will grab the most votes from the areas they're targeting. They won't actually deliver any of it, and the stuff they attempt, they'll just let private companies come in to make a load of money and a massive mess, then fuck off and leave the rest to the taxpayer.
Manifestos aren’t unimportant though. If it’s in a manifesto of a winning party, the Lords can’t block it indefinitely. But I take your wider point.
Actually, that's only about convention. They could vote against a law anyway. And they can't indefinitely block a law being passed. Not since the Parliament Act of 1911 and 1949.
Yes, the Salisbury Convention. A lot of Parliament is based on convention.
What's the mechanism for that?
Not sure it's actually in law or anything, but it's agreed after it goes back and forth so many times (3 I think?) the Lord's will stop amending it.
The Rwanda deportations being a perfect example. If the lords had their way it would never have made it in to law, yet here we are.
What these party’s say they are going to do in the future and what they actually will do are two completely different things 🤔
The conservatives promising billions to fix potholes as if potholes haven't increased exponentially while they have been in power for the last decade and half. Ironic.
Most of us being drivers know first hand what 14 years of Tory rule has done to our roads. Their claim that they will spend any serious lolly on roads is fucking laughable.
2024 **"Conservatives** - £8.3B to fix potholes." 2019 **"Conservatives** - £2B for the biggest ever pothole-filling programme. We're going to fix potholes so that your local roads are safer." [https://x.com/Conservatives/status/1198622047934414849](https://x.com/Conservatives/status/1198622047934414849)
Wasn’t the last estimate that we’d need £18B to repair all potholes? So they’re promising to fix likely less than half of them?
I still do not understand why covid lockdown wasn't a huge opportunity for improving our roads.
For a government which wasn't, ideologically, penny-wise and pound-foolish it would have been.
COVID cost a *fortune*, and there’s been no money in council road budgets since Eric Pickles (remember him?) brutalised them in 2011. The only way new road surfacing takes place at scale is via local authorities being able to set local taxes on house values. Which might be about to happen…
>set local taxes on house values Good luck implementing that - many years ago, there was a proposed council tax revaluation, and even though it would have been cost neutral, the media were incensed that people living in areas that had gentrified since 1991 would have to pay significantly more - especially the elderly, on fixed incomes, living in bigger properties etc - so the revaluation was cancelled. The media also like to moan about ever increasing council tax and ever decreasing local services - deliberately making it seem as though one pays for the other, while omitting that the bulk of local authority funding is via central government grants.
That’s ancient history - a tax on property value increases would be more than popular today. Call it a Boomer tax.
It’s honestly just annoying to read the conservative list. More annoyingly it’ll likely convince a few morons.
"If you vote for us one more time we pinky promise to fix all the shit we broke!" They didn't you fix it before, why would they bother next time, especially when they know from experience they can just lie and idiots will still vote for them?
Yeah, there's nothing to stop them from breaking their promises, but this is as close as you can get to knowing what they intend to do.
Uhm... I think the closest we can get to knowing what the tories will do is by looking at the last 14 years. Not the fanfiction they're writing here.
When considering your vote, remember the conservative manifesto was written when they were 20 points down in the polls. They know they're not going to get into power so they can effectively write what they like Nonetheless, good write up OP
They write what they like anyway. Even when they win they don't do most of what they said they would. Exhibit a BBC News - Conservative Party manifesto 2019: 13 key policies explained https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50524262
Thanks. I spent a bit of time on it and I think I've spotted everything that's directly relevant to drivers, but of course I may have missed something. It's remarkable that there's 50 million drivers in the UK and among all those hundreds of pages of manifestos, this is all they could come up with for us.
Most people who drive don't identify as "drivers". A large proportion who hold a driving license spend very little time on the roads, mainly drive locally and see the whole thing as a bit of an inconvenience. Committed drivers is a relatively small constituency.
Also the reason our roads, and the country in general, is in a shit state is because of 14 years of Tories in power. If you love pot holes, vote Conservative.
Trying to stay a-political. But yes, 14 years of austerity has done this. Not that labour is offering much different, but still they're doing just enough
Yup. Same with the Greens, Reform, and the Lib Dems.
The Green's manifesto is legitimate nightmare scenario shit. Not a single normal person has been involved in its creation. The Conservatives is the best, specifically for drivers, but: A. They're not going to win B. Even if they did, fuck off they'll actually do any of it. Lying bastards. The only one that matters is Labour's - and it's alright. Covers (what I think are) the most important points, but not very ambitious. Which, considering the state of *everything* is to be expected.
Problem with the conservatives is they are listing stuff they ruined and using it as a positive, saying they will sort it out.
Aye, that's basically their entire pitch. "We're the only ones who can be trusted to fix what **we've** broken" Without even a hint of irony or self-awareness
Their core voters don't understand irony or self-awareness, they'll just believe them, and blame Labour
Their core voters are the kind of selfish morons who believe they're entitled to park across two spaces just because their car is expensive.
*looks at some of the posts from the last few days...* You may have stirred the hornets nest.
As a seasoned shit poster I'm sure he's ok with it. Just highlighting the bizarre dissonance in his arguments. Allegedly a green supporter who drives a V10 Audi, and is logic based but cannot extrapolate the logic that everyone arbitrarily deciding to park across 2 spaces halves the capacity of any given car park. Also claims to be socially responsible but can't understand the social irresponsibility of selfish behaviour.... Very weird.
A good proportion of /r/CarTalkUK , then?
And they’ve had the last 14 years to do all those things in, which they haven’t. But trust us, we promise this time we will do it, please, one last chance?
The Conservatives are desperately throwing populist shit at their dwindling supply of middle aged and elderly voters to see what sticks, in the hope it might fend off Reform. -They've been promising investment in northern infrastructure for the past 14 years. they recently scrapped the northern leg on the only major infrastructure project they actually managed to start (if you exclude the very iffy freeports). -They've already lost their court challenge on ULEZ, they may as well announce they're renaming Norway, they have equally little power to do it. -The rest either requires a trip to the magic money tree, or is stuff they could have done at any time in the last 14 years. I think the lib dems actually strike the best balance of progressive and achievable, but labour are also pretty reasonable (if a bit uninspiring). Edit: with regards to the Greens - everyone including them know that they're not going to get anywhere near power. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing having a few idealist voices in the mix challenging convention.
>(if a bit uninspiring) I think people seriously underestimate the monetary value of political stability. I work in major engineering projects, and the taxpayer cost of the constant policy implosions, u-turns and panic has been measured in the fucking billions. Same for the private sector. Folk can adapt to the prevailing business environment, it's the complete unpredictability that's killer. It's massively expensive for government to constantly change its mind. Sticking with an imperfect policy is usually much better than multiple successive changes. You even have situations like Belgium being unable to form a government, or the US government shutdowns, and nothing bad happens. Public services continue to operate, there's just no new policies or laws. I genuinely think we'd have been better of with 14 years of hung parliament rather than the actively destructive government we got. So as much as I'd like some bold, radical policies, I think a government that can simply hold its nerve for more than five minutes will be a major improvement and cost saving.
>very iffy freeports Teeside in particular, as regular readers of _Private Eye_ know only too well...
The summary above has cut out some important things from the conservative manifesto. The £8.3B is to be borrowed from future years budgets to repair roads this/next year.
Not to mention, it's the conservatives. That £8.3B is only going into their back yard, and then the roads they use for commute. Anywhere outside of London won't see any of that funding
The manifesto states it's funded from the cancellation of HS2. The total figure is probably for life of the next parliament rather than an annual figure, if that's what you mean.
Problem is they’ve already done it so why is it in the manifesto?! https://www.gov.uk/government/news/revealed-the-roads-being-resurfaced-in-your-area-thanks-to-reallocated-hs2-funding#:~:text=The%20reallocated%20HS2%20funding%20is,situation%20could%20be%20even%20worse.
>The Conservatives is the best, specifically for drivers, but: >A. They're not going to win >B. Even if they did, fuck off they'll actually do any of it. Lying bastards. How can the Tories present themselves as on the side of the drivers. They introduced the 'luxury tax' on cars over 40k. This resulted in a large payment on purchase and increased tax for 5 years. Not small amounts of money. Now the average price of a new car sold in the uk is over 39k so a hell of a lot if new cars are subject to their increased taxation.
Because they want people to consider the RIGHT NOW and forget the past 14 years; the politically disinterested may be taken by their promises.
I'm reminded of their pledge to recruit an additional 20k police officers... conveniently ignoring that at least 20k police officer posts were cut during the "austerity" years...
The tories can promise anything - they know they aren't going to win, so won't have to actually do any of it. Labour should ask them why they didn't do any of it in their last budget just a few months ago.
That's a massive list of things that won't happen - other than pushing back the ban on new ICE vehicles.
For clarity, Labour and Lib Dems have said they'll move the ban back to its original date of 2030, meaning it will arrive sooner than the current (recently delayed) date of 2035.
It'll effectively happen then anyway, since it's eu wide and companies won't be extending production just for UK vehicles. I suppose extending the deadline might let some weird homologated imports from us or somewhere in, but not to any significant degree.
Eu rule is an effective ban in 2035. UK has a ZEV mandate in place that says you must sell 80% EV by 2030 regardless, the 2030-2035 argument will only impact high end high margin cars like large SUVs and V8 cars - it won't save the hot hatch or accessible performance vehicles.
Didn't the EU/Germany compromise agreed recently put a huge loophole in the ICE ban?
[удалено]
As a former resident of a ‘northern powerhouse’ area that was promised the moon by Osborne, Johnson and the rest, and subsequently received actual fuck all and actually had its (nationally distributed) transport budgets slashed and major infrastructure projects cancelled by Westminster, the Tories can fuck the fuck off to the far side of fuck, and then fuck off some more. Since Thatcher the whole party has turned into one giant boomer-nip grift, overseeing the wholesale transfer of wealth to the mega-rich while claiming to be on the side of the working person. Absolute shysters.
Shout it louder!! And reform is just full of Tories who are scared about losing their seats.
It was happening before Thatcher, she just pulled back the curtain, like stripping the thin veneer of paint off a rotting wall.
Shakespeare couldn't have put it better. Fuck the lot of them
Actually funding HS2 and massively increasing freight rail and bringing back local rail hubs would help massively. Best way to reduce potholes is to get as many heavy goods vehicles off of the road as possible.
My family runs a haulage company, so you’d assume it’d be in my interest for rail freight to stay irrelevant, but this country could really benefit from it. The problem is though, the logistics and pricing model for rail freight is so wanky that trucks just make sense for 95% (a figurative number I pulled from my ass btw not a real stat) of companies to use trucks instead. If we still had a nationalised rail system, it would be far easier to implement, and if we had way more rail lines connecting more places without having to go via other routes in the wrong direction to then switch lines to get in the right direction, and if most/all rail stations had freight yards with facilities for crane loading containers, hoppers/belts to unload bulker trucks carrying grain/coal/raw material etc, it would be GREAT and actually viable. But we have none of that, and it would be so costly to implement that it’d make HS2 look like a bargain. Also, the pricing model for rail freight makes it super unattractive and unreliable for businesses to use it over trucks for transporting their goods, because if one load scheduled for the train gets cancelled, the GBRf then increases the price for the rest of the customers to offset the lost revenue, and it’s quite common for loads to be cancelled as all it would take is for I don’t know let’s say, a farm had their combine harvester break down so their wheat harvest was delayed mid way through it, or a factories production run didn’t meet its quota for an array of different reasons, or a print centre had a printer break down so their daily scheduled print got held up till the next day (super, SUPER common), that load isn’t getting sent until they have enough to send a full load to make it actually cost effective. So then let’s say all these companies were planning to use rail to transport their goods, their quotes for transport costs are forever changing and getting more expensive whenever one of many businesses using that train, has to cancel. The other issue which I already touched on is then that there isn’t proper unloading facilities at all/most rail stations, so let’s say this farm in norfolk wanted to ship their 80 tonnes of barley to a giant brewery up north, well they’d need 3 trucks to take that barley to the nearest train station with a freight loading terminal, and then on the other side, there needs to be a freight loading/unloading station semi close by to the brewery for another 3 wagons to take the 80 tonnes of barley off the train to the brewery. Now I have no stats for this but I get trains very frequently and I know that atleast on the east coast lines and the local stations around norfolk, hardly any of them have proper rail freight loading/unloading facilities to make this a genuinely viable solution, you’d instead have to have the 3 trucks drive 100 miles to the nearest rail freight terminal, to have this grain than shipped way past the brewery on the other side, then needing 3 trucks to go another 100 miles to get to the brewery. Too much going in the wrong direction to get to the nearest freight terminal, would take longer overall straining the supply chain even more, and it then gets even more complicated for companies to ship their produce because now they’re having to deal with 3 transport companies instead of 1 (the trucks to take it to the station, the rail freight company, and the 3 trucks on the other end). It then gets far more confusing when traffic offices in different companies are trying to ring up chasing where their load is and they’re coordinating between 3 companies instead of 1 who takes it all the way from supplier to receiver, so even if rail freight was improved and worked to be slightly cheaper, a lot of companies would still opt for trucks because with the current structure for how rail freight is, the headache clusterfuck for organising timely transport is already hard as it is, and it would get a lot harder switching to rail, and there’s more margin for error/points of failure. Lastly, even if hundreds of billions was spent on building proper rail freight infrastructure at every station in the country or even just most stations, time is the other issue. If you have a freight train going from Harwich docks, all the way up to Edinburgh, but at every station it passes, it has to stop to unload and load up, because more businesses are now able to transport their goods on it, the time it takes for let’s say, a container coming out of the harwich port, to get up to a distribution centre near Edinburgh now takes 2 or 3 days instead of 1 day, which means a lot of people aren’t getting their stuff on time, a load of businesses can’t start their manufacturing runs until later, and the whole “Just in Time” freight logistics model of only ordering stuff in as and when they need it and running their operations on expecting their goods to come in quickly, it then needs to be restructured to accommodate their goods now taking a few days to get there instead of 1 so companies nationwide would then be changing their operations and consumers would have to get used to not expecting everything to be available almost instantly at their fingertips, next day shipping/delivery would be a thing of the past and everyone would moan. TLDR: Unless hundreds of billions was spent on completely overhauling the rail freight system/structure, it will continue to be inferior to road freight in terms of costing, reliability, speed and ease of use.
Ask yourself how much of what the Conservatives are promising matches what they've done in the past 14 years. Now they're promising to fix potholes. Have they been doing it for 14 years? No, they haven't. "No new 20MPH or low traffic neighbourhood zones without local referendums." A local referendum over a street being made 20mph or not? They did a residential street near me. Seemed like a good idea. No-one should be hitting 20mph on that little road unless they're flooring it. Do we really need a vote on it? "Pumpwatch scheme to force petrol retailers to share live prices." There are apps for this already. Why does the government need to spend money on it? "Proposed reforms to penalise overrunning roadworks and "implement consistent approach" to yellow box enforcement." Why wasn't this done in the past 14 years.
> A local referendum over a street being made 20mph or not? They did a residential street near me. Seemed like a good idea. No-one should be hitting 20mph on that little road unless they're flooring it. Do we really need a vote on it? Been shown this week that it [makes a huge improvement for safety too](https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/09/vehicle-damage-claims-wales-fall-20mph-speed-limit)
This post is framed as though all drivers will see all these changes as positive. Quite an assumption.
Not sure how Tories are planning to reverse ULEZ expansion when the government already lost the legal challenge to be able to stop it.
Same as with the Rwanda bill if they really wanted to. With heavy handed legislation which courts cannot overrule. Regardless of what happens in Rwanda, every person or organisation involved in asylum claims etc. must now consider Rwanda as a safe country. The next section also forbids any court or tribunal from hearing legal challenges that it isn't safe...
The Tories, the party who introduced it
Same as with the Welsh 20 limit. Transport is a devolved matter over which they have no direct say.
Haven't had a chance to look at each report....but thanks for the overview.... It's interesting to see the spending the conservatives are committing to spend on roads/transport, whilst pledging to also cut taxes. Makes me think that they will be making further cuts to other areas where the money is equally needed.
Most of that money is coming from the abandonment of HS2. And some of the stuff they're quoting is already in the works (A55 improvements).
Bear in mind that the goverment's total spend each year is about 1,200B (1.2 trillion) They actually say they'll spend £36B total on roads, rail, buses etc but this is all the spend I could find that was only for cars/roads.
> Makes me think that they will be making further cuts to other areas where the money is equally needed Benefits payments are going to be reduced to pay for a big chunk of stuff. Worth remembering that a huge percentage of benefits are paid to in-work adults, so reducing this will lead to further unnecessary poverty
I'm normally very Green, but when it comes to driving and cars they need to get fucked. None of what they have proposed is remotely workable.
[удалено]
Make them walkable. Fine. Connect them to public transport so people can get out of the estate without needing a road. Fin - oh, nevermind, the railway line isn't getting built because it might knock down *one* tree and the Greens can't have that. Uhhhhh Well, hope you like walking 2.5km to the nearest road.
> Connect them to public transport so people can get out of the estate without needing a road. Fin - oh, nevermind, the railway line isn't getting built because it might knock down one tree and the Greens can't have that. It's this shit that puts me off the greens, and a lot of the groups associated with them. There are trade-offs for everything. One of the trade-offs for living in a modern industrialised nation is that you'll need new things sometimes and those new things will be built in places that used to be fields and forests. You either accept that, yes, there will be some loss of forests and/or fields, or you don't get the shit you keep banging on about wanting. They're not even NIMBY's, they're "BANANAs" - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. Literally any kind of housing, infrastructure or transport scheme gets objected to because it might impact some natural feature or other, with the ultimate result that nothing gets built at all. See also: HS2. One of the best hopes for a Starmer government (and there are precious few of those) is that he's promising to completely rip up our shit planning laws, so we can actually get some of the improvements the Greens always say they want without those same Greens tying every single one of them up in red tape.
Do you agree with their stance on nuclear power?
I'm pro-nuclear, and pro as many means of energy production as possible, no single means is perfect.
Good. That's the correct view. Nuclear is a necessary baseline, renewables will top it up. I couldnt help but actually get angry at their manifesto when I read their thing about nuclear. Everything they said about it was a provable lie. Mind you... I might be a bit biased being a nuclear researcher.
Most of the time Greens are blinkered to their own little world, just like those on the other far side. Nuclear in the UK makes so much sense, we're fairly seismically stable, coasts are fairly calm and we have huge areas with the required water and land. with the pushes to move to BEVs, Nuclear is pretty much required to accommodate the needed power. I don't work in energy or anything nuclear
Good info but I’ll believe it when I see it, from any party. On my wishlist (as someone who doesn’t have an EV yet), would be a commitment from the government to incentivise employers and car park owners to rig up their places with chargers. And remove red tape so they can get them onto on street parking etc. Will never happen tho
There needs to be a push for workplace charging.. my business has an arm that installs them so we’ve been going around putting them into our offices (all of which are leased). Most landlords have been fine with it, they see the benefits of it as and when we move on, etc. One office, however, has landlords as greedy and avaricious as you can imagine. The cost to install new circuits and the chargers is about £10-20k, depending on whether it’s 2 or 4 of them, and the complexity. The landlords wanted an “approval fee” of £4,000. PER CHARGING POINT. Additionally, as well as charging us for the electricity used, they wanted all the revenue from the chargers (they’re accessible to members of the public so can generate income). They effectively wanted us to pay for it all, pay them an equivalent cost on top for the privilege, and then give them any additional money on top. And they wonder why people are leaving their offices in droves.
Always makes me laugh seeing the Tories promise the world in the manifesto like they haven't just had 14 years to implement these changes. I'm not tribal to any party, but the current lot are arseholes. Not saying the other parties are any better, but fuck me - the arrogance.
Are the Green Party having a laugh. All ICE cars banned by 2035? Get lost.
Conservatives literally forced ULEZ expansion on the mayor of London. They are so sneaky, now trying to use it as part of their culture war.
can you explain how? I havent heard of this until now
See page 4 of the [extraordinary funding letter from the Department for Transport and TfL](https://content.tfl.gov.uk/extraordinary-funding-and-financing-agreement-may-2020.pdf) dated May 2020: > TfL agrees to [...] The immediate reintroduction of the London Congestion Charge, LEZ and ULEZ and urgently bring forward proposals to widen the scope and levels of these charges, in accordance with the relevant legal powers and decision-making processes. It couldn't be more clear - "widen the scope and levels of these charges"
The order comes from above your air must be atleast this clean to be fit for human consumption, which we mostly blow through the limit of anyway. But then the local authority is forced to take some form of action to look like pollution is going to go down. Manchester I think is trying to do it by buying electric buses and slapping cycle lanes everywhere but that's expensive. For the intensity of the problem and the lack of funding from government the only thing London could do was a clean air zone. Anything else they go bankrupt and do nothing they get fined by the government and go bankrupt.
This is a genuine question, not trying to be snarky, but how? And do you have any links for it? I'm not saying you're wrong or lying; it's just this has been such a plank of partisan fighting over the last few years that if the Tories did force this then it's one of the most brazen things I've seen in politics for a very long time.
> Ministers have been accused of hypocrisy in claiming Sadiq Khan expanded London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) to raise revenue after it emerged the Department for Transport urged the mayor to extend the city’s congestion charge for the same reason. [Source](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/29/tories-accused-hypocrisy-ulez-row-call-extend-congestion-charge)
Interesting. What I've taken from that article isn't so much that they forced it on him but that they made demands very similar those Khan implemented then went on to castigate him for imposing something fundamentally of the same nature. Either way, rank hypocrisy even if my slightly different reading of it is accurate.
Greens - ban on construction of new roads? There's been a notable uptick in traffic this year. We need more infrastructure for the future and that includes more roads. Public transport is not sufficient enough for us living in the real world and the price disparity in housing and wages between the south of England and everywhere else means that more people are commuting longer distances to work than before.
Building more roads doesn't reduce traffic. Ideally we need integrated public transport options and things like safe cycle ways to encourage fewer car journeys and better use of the roads we have.
Fixing potholes is a task that local government is responsible for. UK Government has slashed local government funding since 2010 and forced them to prioritise adult social care, which is why councils can't afford to fix the roads. Do we want more of the same (Conservatives) or do we want change?
Well the green party can suck a fat one.
The Greens are never going to come into power. So they know that they're never going to implement these policies. They're benchmarks for where they want to be, that they can hopefully use to help nudge the parties who end up in power by showing them that there's appetite for more green policy.
The Greens: Fuck you if you’re poor.
I'm normally with the green party, but that reeks of London centric thinking, that we just use public transport or walk. Which is fine in big cities, less so in smaller towns or the countryside. Car emissions are not really the problem either, it makes up for a small amount of global emissions, and is a way to pass the blame onto the public rather than tackle the small number of corporations that are producing over 80% of emissions
It's completely dumb. Who's going to pay for my car to be replaced when they ban it? Presumably me. What will be the effect on the economy of millions of people having to save a huge portion of their income to buy a new car? They know they're not getting in so they can chat any old shite but they should at least try. This makes me think they're actually stupid.
Yup... Workable if I worked in the city... For my current workplace though? Public transport is out of the question. A 15 minute drive becomes over an hour by bus, public transport doesn't run early enough either. Cycling isn't practical, it's a good 45-ish minutes away. So I'm losing 1 hour on commute times, another 10-15 minutes to get changed before/after work, another 10-15 minutes on top of that to account for varying performance levels, another hour lost as I'd have to get up earlier (thus sleep earlier). You're talking as much as 2.5 hours a day lost by cycling to work for me personally. I can earn more money, I can't earn more time... And once you attach a cost to that time, it actually works out cheaper to run the car anyway.
>that reeks of London centric I think that's the point. They're, at best, hoping for a handful of MPs and they'll never come from rural communities. Their best chances are London, Brighton, Bristol etc and maybe some home counties.
Roads got like this under the tories but they’ll so fix them if you vote for them this time, honest. Fucking bollocks. Shame Greens aims are so ridiculously unachievable, like obviously if you have your head screwed on we are living during s climate crisis and a tipping point, realistically we do need to just stop right this second but it that isn’t actually implementable. They’d would just end up pushing it back like the rest. Some bits from Greens that OP decided to leave out, but conveniently not for the tories. Increase annual public subsidies for rail and bus travel to £10bn by the end of the next Parliament, with free bus travel for under-18s. Invest in an additional £19bn over five years to improve public transport, support electrification and create new cycleways and footpaths. Bring the railways back into public ownership. Give local authorities control over and funding for improved bus services.
Only the Labour manifesto matters at the point. The others are just wish casting. And Starmer has a history of going back on pledges. So… Reform should really go all in and promise to ban all private parking enforcement 😈
Of all those Id say Conservatives are the best. on paper of course. I didnt know about the A27 bypass at Arundel. I have to go that way sometimes and it would be big improvement, but not as bad as all of the roundabouts around Chichester. Its not even the biggest hold up from where I am. The first 6 miles can take up to an hour in rush hour.
Green Party are so fucking stupid, they just make impossible promises. I’ve always said it’s like they don’t want to get in, tbh I hope they dont
Makes me laugh that parties think that moving the ZEV mandate back to 2030 is going to make a huge difference lol All it will do is kill the car buying sector quicker than the current 2035 deadline
The current rules state you have to sell 80% EV by 2030 anyway. And that ramps up year on year to 100% by 2035. (2031 - 84%, 2032 - 88%, 2033 - 92%, 2024 - 96%) The remaining 20% from 2030 was originally supposed to be vehicles of "significant zero emissions capability", but what that actually meant was never defined. So instead of defining it they just left it at ICE. Anyone who thinks the change in 2030 wording will make any difference to the cars that the regular punter will actually be able to buy is in for a shock. Large SUVs, and the occasional top of the line performance car will be left with engines, that's about it. VW group will prioritise Porsches, Lambos, and high end Audis, not Octavias and Golfs. Stellantis will leave a few Maseratis and top end Alfas. Toyota will have Land Cruisers. JLR will prioritise full fat Range Rovers. The fine for OEMs not meeting those targets are £15k / EV not delivered. So if in 2032 you sell 100k cars in the UK, but only 80% of them are EVs vs the 88% target, you've missed by 8k EVs, and will be fined £120M. This is why the head of Ford Europe recently said that Ford will just prioritise volume to other markets outside of the UK - the risk of penalty for missing targets is too big. All of this is already in place today, and was a flagship piece of legislation of the Boris government. This year's target is 22%, which the industry as a whole hits, but a big chunk of that is Tesla. So OEMs can try to overcompensate in the coming years for missing this year's target, or they can hand their money to the world's richest man's EV company.
The green are mental . Reform prefer Gas cars right ? Zyklon B gas I assume Fixing a million potholes is meaningless it should be miles of road but I assume they’ve figured out people are stupid and like big numbers Fuck the tories
I’m by no means a fan of Farage but fucking hell hahaha
I think there's 1 million potholes in the 1mile road near me.
Note "**Fixing** a million **potholes**" As opposed to resurfacing... Even if they were going to follow through with the promise, it'd be the usual stuff and stamp bodge job that lasts about 4 days.
Note that none of the manifestos have anything to say about speed limits, or their enforcement.
Presumably because they are basically fine and it works
They will wait until everyone has an ev and they’ll just remotely fine you if you go over the speed limit - make no mistake, we’ll all be effectively on a control grid by 2040
Thanks for going through these for us OP, looks like you've spent a decent amount of time here. Appreciate it
It's entirely possible that none of the above could happen, but I find it interesting that the cost of car insurance comes up in the manifestos of both the main parties. It's clearly an issue that's cutting through enough for them to be talking about it.
Labours is wishy washy, all a bit vague, lots of wiggle room and no actual commitments.
Greens aren't serious people, let alone a serious party. Imagine thinking that banning perfectly serviceable ICE cars is good for the environment on balance. No thought to investing in synthetic fuels etc.
You've neglected to list anything relating to public transport, that's a huge boon for drivers. Cutting out unnecessary journeys helps those who are making necessary ones.
I'm a Labour voter but the Greens are genuinely more scary than the Conservatives or Reform, just a batshit insane party.
Not a single mention of getting people back into the left lane so we can clear up traffic flow everywhere
what makes me laugh is they cant fix the pot holes but can afford to put speed bumps everywhere.
Do not vote for the Tories, please, I beg you.
There is no chance they will get the votes to be in, don't worry.
Reform are just MAGA UK.
Even as a medium hardcore petrolhead, I think the Reform stance on this is insane. Yes, it'd be lovely if we could all drive huge v8s without having to worry about the environment, but it's kinda despicable to fuck the planet over to try to net more votes from climate change denying idiots. I like the ulez retraction and blocking more of the idiotic 20mph limits, but no way in hell am I voting conservative. I don't think it's good to have any party in power too long, and they've definitely outstayed their welcome
I'm an EV enthusiast but it's obvious there is absolutely fuck all chance of the ICE ban happening in 2030 or even 2035 unless we do two things. 1. Give Chinese automakers complete freedom to sell their cars here tariff and tax free. 2. Install hundreds of thousands of destination chargers in every car park that cost under 20p a kwh Neither of these things have the slightest chance of happening so we'll just be sat here in 2035 like Ned Flanders' parents.
I would have liked to see some kind of standardisation and enforced interoperability of the charging network. It’s absolute chaos at the moment. We should be able to pay for any charger on any app and not spend ten minutes working out how to use it or trying to find the charger ID. If we are phasing out ICE we need a ground up rethink of how we charge their replacements.
Sounds like communism. The free market will solve all those problems /s in case it wasn't obvious
Help us, EU, you’re our only hope
Why would the greens think 20mph in built up areas is a good idea? Everyone in Wales hates it and they're reverting a lot of them. Bunch of nut jobs
The greens are just absolutely mindless and don’t actually seem like a very Green Party. The rest of the parties seem to have pretty decent manifestos minus maybe reform
It's all just lies
First line of the Green Party. Are they mental?
Labour fixing a million potholes? Fuck there is about that in my local town alone!
2024 **"Conservatives** - £8.3B to fix potholes." 2019 **"Conservatives** - £2B for the biggest ever pothole-filling programme. We're going to fix potholes so that your local roads are safer." [https://x.com/Conservatives/status/1198622047934414849](https://x.com/Conservatives/status/1198622047934414849)
What they should be doing "for drivers" - what you should want them to do - is understand Induced Demand which has been known since the 1930s. More roads, more lanes, makes people drive more, which makes traffic *worse*. Improve lives for drivers by *giving people viable alternatives to driving* - buses, trains, walking, biking, trams, working from home, ride sharing - so people who don't want to drive get out of their cars and leave the roads clearer and safer for people who need to drive, or want to drive. Reliable, affordable, convenient, alternatives to driving; make freight travel on trains instead of lorries. Then the people who need to drive, and the people who want to invest thousands of their own money to drive by choice, get much better driving conditions - clearer roads, no cyclists on the roads, no road rage from people who don't want to be there, no drivers who are elderly and unsafe but have no alternatives - and the tax burden of building and maintaining all the roads goes down because there's fewer roads.
I wonder what's the plan from the Green Party for people with low salaries who cannot buy an ev car.
It doesn't really matter because they won't see much power at all. They're appealing to climate alarmists whose entire personalities hinge on "saving the planet".
Thanks OP for the handy summary. Bloody good work mate!
i would rather kill than give up petrol car in 2035
Reform wins for me.
They're all selected, not elected. None of it matters anyway. They give false impression that the people have a say. Electrification of the road network is coming whether we like it or not. Being able to disable access to vehicles remotely for individuals, as well as having full tracking abilities is just too good to pass up for those who wish to control you. Watch this space.
But... bikes can already go in the bus lane conservatives. Thats quite stupid.
tbf in some places like sheff and leeds motorcycles can use the bus lanes.
I can believe the ICE ban will be put off but every other policy that will cost money will not happen regardless who promised it.
Green and Reform are equally as bonkers on either ends of the scale. Labour and Lib Dems are the most sensible. If you believe the tories will actually use money for what they say they will, you are an idiot and I have some snake oil to sell you.
>The Green Party >Ban all ICE cars from the roads by 2035. to think I used to like the green party. that is batshit insane
The conservatives have had over 10yrs to all that stuff & didn't so I don't trust them as far as I could chuck them lol not saying I trust labour more I don't
As a driver I’d love an LTN on my road - makes it easier to park, eliminates people using my road as a shortcut, stops people having takeaways and dumping the refuse out of the window and virtually eliminates fly tipping.
OMG the greens… it’s like they live in a fantasy world…
Do the Tories want to ban councils setting 20mph speed limits without a referendum? That’s insane. I’m vaguely planning to vote Green based on their social policies but their environmental policies make it quite difficult. I like the policy of expanding 20 zones but no new road building (including bypass roads for built up areas?) is nuts, especially when they also oppose rail construction.
I think all manifestos are bulls#it, but why forget to add £20K tax free allowance to Reform manifesto? Think if that is brought in, all taxpayers will benefit from it and it may encourage more scroungers to work, good in my book. I must say, no all claiments are scroungers, but there seem to be more than ever!
Just wondering why the Conservative party did not do all the items before in the last 14 years?
The Greens have such a sensible policy 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️ luckily they’re too radical and un pragmatic to ever get anywhere close to power, same for Reform. None of them, whoever wins power is going to do what they say anyway. Load of self serving,lying twats no matter what colour their tie is, wether it’s no Sky Rishi or legohead Starmer all drivers are going to get taxed more, road pricing is probably going to be back on the table. Hopefully whoever’s in charge gets told to get fucked just like they did last time they thought about it.
Glad insurance is mentioned in labour, it's ridiculous. I do wish they would push for roadworks and road closures to be better managed also, give contracts to companies who are actually good not just cheap. Too many times you see signs up for 3 weeks closing off lanes, work being done so slowly, then another 2 weeks of lanes closed only for it to one day be "open"... Anyone in Notts near the train station with the new builds knows what I mean. Infuriating.
The only good thing the Tories have done is - fuel duty has been frozen since 2011 and temporary cut by 5p in 2022. If they hadn’t done this - fuel would be what - 30p more per litre than now. Of course - they introduced the escalator in the 90s so….
I thought EV batteries won’t last more than 8-10 years and the waste of old batteries + lithium mining is poluting as much as a petrol car does in 500.000 miles or so, i’ve seen a study about it, not sure how real it is and if they took into account oil changes twice a year. I don’t get why all the parties are so obsessed with EVs. Surely they can start by replacing polyester fiber with cotton or bamboo and find alternatives to single use plastic, that would really make a difference.