2020 was the Golden Age of the centrist dad — what 1917 was for the Bolshevik and 2003 was for the neoconservative. Wine was sipped. Banana bread was baked. “Public health” reigned supreme.
The socio-economic assumptions of the long ‘90s were tested to breaking point: deference to public institutions, issues-based opinion polling (which showed massive support for masking that evaporated in practice a month later), open-borders experiments, and a culture of censorship.
Most of these have since been consigned to the dustbin of history. There are, of course, holdouts: COVID maskers drawing stares on trains, legacy journalists railing against online anonymity and the “irresponsible” uses of free speech. But one area has seen precious little restorationist spirit — the war on the motor car.
Much like every other centrist dad bête noir, the obsession with cars is longstanding. The blood libels usually begin with claims that Britain is “in love with the motor car” or that we live in a “car-dependent society.” To me, that makes about as much sense as saying we live in an “electricity-dependent society.” In reality, politicians of every stripe since the 1960s have tried to curb reliance on cars through so-called “active travel schemes.”
No other group in Britain, except smokers, are policy-makers so openly proud of inconveniencing
The early efforts included the Buchanan Report (Traffic in Towns, 1963), which laid the intellectual groundwork for restricting cars in city centres, and the pedestrianisation of shopping streets in Leeds, Glasgow and London during the 1960s and 70s. No longer would the pedestrian suffer the indignity of waiting to cross the road, now they must dodge unlicensed electric pedicabs instead. Perhaps the boldest was the Runcorn Busway (opened in 1971), a fully segregated bus-only road system where every estate was within walking distance of a stop, while cars were banished to a ring road around the town. Like so many half-baked utopian experiments, it collapsed the moment people could afford cars, because, given the choice, families overwhelmingly preferred the freedom of driving to the dreariness of waiting for a bus.
No other group in Britain, except smokers, are policy-makers so openly proud of inconveniencing. Skinny-fat think-tankers in their mid-30s, still clinging to provisional licences, compete with one another to dream up new ways of bothering the motorist. It is the revenge of a class that never got to own a souped-up Vauxhall Nova at 17, condemned instead to a lifetime of cycling helmets, hi-viz tabards and resentment. No accident these people went to university and came back the worst people you knew.
What is striking is how the anti-motorist lobby has mirrored the left more broadly, shifting away from the bus, once celebrated by Bolsheviks like Ken Livingstone and the urban planners of the 1970s, and towards the bicycle, far more characteristic of the New Left. At times, the two factions have clashed directly in a sort of Bolshevik–Menshevik rivalry: Ken’s bendy buses were famously accused of being unsafe for cyclists.
Cyclists themselves are a curious tribe. There is something almost Ballardian in their desire for confrontation: “The erotic potential contained in the aluminium frame colliding with silver bonnet.” The French psychoanalyst Régis Blanchard once wrote about middle-aged men who turn to cross-dressing as a kind of fetishistic escape valve, a way of acting out suppressed frustrations in public. The “middle-aged man in Lycra” fits the same mould — fetishism disguised as fitness.
Where cycling really works, as in Holland, its inclusivity is emphasised. Young women, pensioners and office workers all pedal sedately on upright Dutch bikes, without the Lycra or the militant posture. It is no accident that Britain’s only real cycling success story has been the rise of Lime bikes, which mirror this model of convenience and accessibility rather than demanding a lifestyle conversion. Holland itself tells us something important: it boasts one of the densest motorway networks in Europe even as it champions everyday cycling. It is a country of sharp contrasts — the first to legalise gay marriage, yet also home to Dutch Reformed conservatives who still bar women from standing as candidates.
Unfortunately, the current Labour government, like every unpopular administration before it, has reached for the oldest trick in the book, persecuting the law-abiding. Sunak did it with smoking bans and talk of national service, Starmer is doing it with the motorist. The plan includes mandatory eye tests for older drivers, stripping pensioners of their independence and dumping the cost onto the already-buckling adult social care system when Dad now needs a taxi just to get to the shops. It lowers the drink-drive limit from 35 to 22 micrograms, despite Britain already having the second-lowest drink-driving deaths in Europe. There is even talk of slashing the national speed limit in the countryside to 50 mph — a direct attack on rural life, where the car is not a luxury but a necessity.
If we are serious about civilisational renewal, the family car has to be at the centre of it
Readers of a post-liberal bent may hesitate to defend the “right” to drive after two pints. But Labour, much like with the Online Safety Act — sold to the public on the basis that “privacy is for paedos” — believes this sort of petty authoritarianism plays well in the polls. A stand must be made here. Instead of trusting people to use their own judgement, Labour would criminalise thin women who had a few glasses of wine the night before. Reform, if it is to mean anything, must commit to abolishing these attacks on the motorist and go further, scrapping the outdated 70 mph motorway speed limit, which was imposed in the 1960s before ABS, modern tyres, or crumple zones, and tearing up Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. Residents of posh areas like Herne Hill should not be allowed to wall themselves off in car-free enclaves while pushing traffic onto everyone else.
There is also a class aspect to all this. Richard Hammond once observed that the attitude of government is that people sitting on the M25 at eight o’clock on a Monday morning are there “for a laugh.” It goes without saying that tradesmen cannot take their tools on the Tube, but neither should the ordinary motorist be asked to give up their car as some kind of cosmic balancing act. Cars are fantastic: they are safe, they are cosy, they are fantastically useful, and society should accommodate them rather than treat them as a problem to be managed. Here is the final irony: the same post-liberals who gnash their teeth about Britain’s declining birth rate, especially in the cities, are the ones who sneer at the car. Yet no institution is more vital to young families than the motor car. Parents cannot ferry babies, prams, and shopping onto a bicycle or through the Underground barriers. If we are serious about civilisational renewal, the family car has to be at the centre of it.
